Abhay,

You are right .....sort of.....A license will not bring in the big bucks.......... hard work will.................There is Good news for the have nots ............If Obama gets elected he will make it all better and SHARE THE WEALTH!!!!

Obama will make it a whole lot better for me.  RailRoad Retirement is financially strong and healthy.  If McCain gets elected, he wants to put it in with Social Security and then Privatize it.  I spent over 30yrs walking trains in all types weather, climbing and switching boxcars, and  for the last 15yrs of employment, fighting with FTRA Gangbangers almost every trip. 

I  earned my pension. I have beautiful children, grandchildren, and a stunning wife, that are accustomed to the life I can provide for them with my pension.  Barack Obama will preserve Railroad Retirement and my lifestyle.  Obama has walked the walk.

http://www.utu.org/worksite/obama/Video/play_video.htm

RPK, just curious. did you listen to everthing Obama said to Joe the Plumber about sharing the wealth? Did you hear the part about his believing that when people on the low end of the income scale do better, so will the rest of the county?

Abhay,

You made this statement "RailRoad Retirement is financially strong and healthy.  If McCain gets elected, he wants to put it in with Social Security and then Privatize it." Would you be so kind as to provide a link to this assertion.

Thanks

Blitzen,

Yes I did listen....carefully..............They should do better through hard work/dedication and...not through wealth redistribution!!! I believe in equality of opportunity, not equality of outcomes. And please do not call me a racist because of my opinions

And how many times have you heard Obama say exactly that?  Maybe none since I doubt you really listen to anything he has to say. Obama has said time after time that parents need to turn off the TV sets and get involved in their kids lives so they can get a better education and a better job to earn a better living. I have never heard McCain one time stress responsibility to the citizens of this country. Did I miss that? Do you plan to accept SS and Medicare?

http://www.utu.org/worksite/obama/mccains_positions.htm

http://www.aflcio.org/issues/politics/mccain_retirement.cfm

http://anti-union.blogspot.com/2008/10/joe-plumber-hey-joe-by-david-macaray.html

Hey, Joe

by DAVID MACARAY

By now, most people have heard of Joe Wurzelbacher, the Ohio plumber’s assistant whom John McCain chose to promote as a symbol of working class Americans who will be victimized by Barack Obama’s announced tax plan. Talk about a clumsy promotion. During the course of Wednesday’s presidential debate, “Joe the Plumber” was mentioned a staggering twenty-five times.

Leaving aside Wurzelbacher’s personal views on politics—which turn out to be a mixed bag of knee-jerk homilies, including calling the Iraq occupation a “good thing,” railing against people who “criticize” America, arguing that social security should be privatized (after the latest Wall Street debacle, wouldn’t we all be broke?), and declaring that no one should have to pay taxes—his work background needs to be examined.

After all, this guy was yanked out of obscurity by the Republican Party’s nominee for president, and held up to the country on national television as a representative of America’s hard-working plumbers. He’s Joe the Plumber, the poster boy for the country’s blue-collar skilled workers. It’s important we know who he is and what he does.

First of all, Joe the Plumber is not a plumber, at least not a licensed one. His job title is “plumber’s assistant.” He works for Newell’s Plumbing and Heating, a two-man outfit in Toledo, run out of a garage behind Al Newell’s house. The way McCain portrayed Joe the Plumber, he was this budding entrepreneur looking to buy his own company, only to have that dream in danger of being destroyed by Obama’s confiscatory tax plan.

In 2003, Joe the Plumber applied for a plumber’s apprentice program and took adult education classes to that end. He never finished the program and never received a license from the city of Toledo or Lucas County, Ohio. As a plumber’s assistant, he’s not required to have a license, so long as his boss has one (which Al Newell does). But Joe the Plumber is also not allowed to call himself a “plumber.” Joe the Plumber is a fiction.

Second, the reference to Newell’s business as being worth between “$250,000-$280,000,” is very likely another falsehood. Because Al Newell does little fix-it jobs (repairing toilets, leaky pipes, etc.), local plumbing companies in and around the Toledo area estimate his business to be worth a fraction of the amount mentioned by McCain’s people, who needed the higher figure as a basis for making their case.

Third, while no one can say for certain, it’s improbable that Joe the Plumber is in a position to buy Newell’s business, modest as it is. Not only did the single father with a 13-year old son earn about $40,000 last year, he has a $1,182 lien against him from the state of Ohio for failure to pay back taxes. Also, isn’t there that little matter of a major credit crunch going on with the banks?<

For any one who is interested, this article explains the magnitude of risk that faces the world economies as a result of the current crisis. The reality is that there is no playbook in terms of how best to deal with today's problems. All we have are the things that one should NOT do based on how events careened out of control during the Great Depression.

So the Fed and the Treasury - as well as central banks around the world - are trying to avoid undertaking actions that are believed to have been responsible for the Great Depression. Whether it will work or not is a whole different question since there is no precedent for a crisis such as the one we are facing.

Here is the article:

www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/24/AR2008102402933.html

 While Abhay worries that Joe the Plumber didn't jump through the union's hoops, we have this occuring:

October 25, 2008

The folks over at ACORN - Barack Obama's favorite "community organizers" - now admit that more than 30 percent of the 1.3 million voter-registration forms they submitted this year were rejected by election officials nationwide.

So much for claims by the left that the issue is nothing to worry about.

Never mind all those applications by Mickey Mouse and Jive Turkey.

ACORN says no more than "1 to 1.5 percent" involved actual fraud - which was committed, according to their friends at The New York Times, by "low-income field workers trying to please their supervisors." They were only following orders, you see . . .

Then again, yesterday's Times admits that ACORN-related voting fraud seems "to have resonated" - even among some Democrats and independents.

And with good reason.

Just a few days earlier, People for the American Way, the left-wing advocacy group, took out a full-page ad in the Times defending ACORN.

Charges of fraud, said the ad, are all a bunch of lies cooked up by "right-wing operatives" intent on keeping "low-income people and African-Americans from voting."

Maybe there were some problems with ACORN's voter registrations, the ad says, but only "a few bad apples" were responsible.

Too bad People for the American Way couldn't read the same day's Times before it placed that ad.