Joe the Plumber

Everything seems to be going fine for Democrat presidential nominee Barack Obama. He is up in all nationwide opinion polls and he is slamming his Republican rival John McCain in virtually all battleground states. Then suddenly he bumped into an ordinary plumber from Ohio, a meeting that both men wished never happened.

That plumber turned out to be Samuel Joe Wurzelbacher, now popularly known as ‘Joe the Plumber’. While Obama was doing his routine house-to-house visit in suburban Ohio, Joe the Plumber took the chance and asked the Democrat hopeful whether he will be taxed more under the latter’s proposed tax plan should he become president. Obama’s ‘spread the wealth’ response not only put his tax plan under scrutiny, but his ability to steer the country out of recession.

McCain called the Obama tax plan as socialism and Obama supporters fired back that the current Republican administration’s bailout efforts in the financial system is the highest form of socialism. However, the Joe the Plumber saga has definitely provided the McCain campaign a lifeline less than three weeks to go before election day.

In the last presidential elections in 2004 here in the Philippines, taxes were never a huge debating issue between incumbent President Arroyo and opposition standard bearer the late Fernando Poe Joe Jr. In the upcoming 2010 polls, though, taxes are expected to become a factor as the country moves towards a slowdown and possibly a recession. With steady high inflation and unemployment crippling the economy due to rapid population growth and the global financial crisis, the Filipino middle class will surely be interested how the presidential candidates plan to make their every peso worth.