Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman: The Real Plumbers of Ohio

[DeepModem Mom]

NYT: The Real Plumbers of Ohio
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: October 20, 2008

Forty years ago, Richard Nixon made a remarkable marketing discovery. By exploiting America’s divisions — divisions over Vietnam, divisions over cultural change and, above all, racial divisions — he was able to reinvent the Republican brand. The party of plutocrats was repackaged as the party of the “silent majority,” the regular guys — white guys, it went without saying — who didn’t like the social changes taking place....

Thus we have Sarah Palin expressing her joy at visiting the “pro-America” parts of the country — yep, we’re all traitors here in central New Jersey. Meanwhile we’ve got Mr. McCain making Samuel J. Wurzelbacher, a k a Joe the Plumber — who had confronted Barack Obama on the campaign trail, alleging that the Democratic candidate would raise his taxes — the centerpiece of his attack on Mr. Obama’s economic proposals. And when it turned out that the right’s new icon had a few issues, like not being licensed and comparing Mr. Obama to Sammy Davis Jr., conservatives played victim: see how much those snooty elitists hate the common man?

But what’s really happening to the plumbers of Ohio, and to working Americans in general?

First of all, they aren’t making a lot of money. You may recall that in one of the early Democratic debates Charles Gibson of ABC suggested that $200,000 a year was a middle-class income. Tell that to Ohio plumbers: according to the May 2007 occupational earnings report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average annual income of “plumbers, pipefitters and steamfitters” in Ohio was $47,930.

Second, their real incomes have stagnated or fallen, even in supposedly good years. The Bush administration assured us that the economy was booming in 2007 — but the average Ohio plumber’s income in that 2007 report was only 15.5 percent higher than in the 2000 report, not enough to keep up with the 17.7 percent rise in consumer prices in the Midwest. As Ohio plumbers went, so went the nation: median household income, adjusted for inflation, was lower in 2007 than it had been in 2000.

Third, Ohio plumbers have been having growing trouble getting health insurance, especially if, like many craftsmen, they work for small firms. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, in 2007 only 45 percent of companies with fewer than 10 employees offered health benefits, down from 57 percent in 2000.

And bear in mind that all these data pertain to 2007 — which was as good as it got in recent years....

***

(T)he typical plumber would pay lower, not higher, taxes under an Obama administration, and would have a much better chance of getting health insurance....

Whatever today’s G.O.P. is, it isn’t the party of working Americans.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/20/opinion/20krugman.html?hp

[Bread and Circus]

1. Thank you. I think the Obama campaign should reinforce this perspective in their talking

points.

Many of us were saying the exact same things the night all of that "Joe the Plumber" business broke out. While many wanted to discredit him (back taxes, etc.) the bigger and more political issue is that he would do MUCH better under Obama than McCain.

[Median Democrat]

2. Nice - Rare Coverage Of Actual Issues!

[me b zola]

3. I honestly don't know whether to laugh, cry, or scream

...when I see clips of McCain rallies when they are all cheering for the idiot & fraudulent "Joe the plumber". Then McCain goes into his screed of Obama as Robin Hood, and I look at those in attendance and again I am at a loss for those that I see whom that I am pretty safe in assuming that they would do much better under the Obama tax plan cheering McCain's lies, misrepresentations, and inflammatory remarks.

:argh:

[SemiCharmedQuark]

4. What about Richie the Hedge Fund Manager???

"I don’t want to suggest that everyone would be better off under the Obama tax plan. Joe the plumber would almost certainly be better off, but Richie the hedge fund manager would take a serious hit."

:thumbsup:

[kenny blankenship]

5. Charles Gibson of ABC suggested that $200,000 a year was a middle-class income

Well it's an upper-middle-class income from one perspective: no one making that without a large trust fund behind them can quit working permanently in their young adult years and go on to continue living a comfortable life with a secure old age ahead of them. If you define "upper class" as not needing to work for a living then that isn't upper-class unless 200,000 is what you receive passively from your trust fund. But obviously, 200,000 in earned income is a world away from living on 47,000 a year. Statistically, 200k is around one hundred thousand above what you need to be in the top fifth of income earners. At 47k household income, you'd have to be budgeted down to the nickel.

That confusion of what middle class means to most Americans just shows how completely out of touch media figures like Gibson are. He doesn't rub elbows with a lot of people making 40k and hasn't for many years.

You can't expect relevant news and a sane perspective on it from a media cadre that has been corrupted by the lure of belonging to the elites they report on. It just cannot work that way, and even individual cases of reporters who "try to remember where they came from" are not reliable over the long term.

[Hope And Change]

6. K & R!