October 24, 2008

• I am Joe the Plumber

  I wish McCain's ad showing other people claiming to be Joe the Plumber would go further to explain how Obama's plans will hurt small businesses, which employ more than half of the workers in the United States. While there are big corporations that hire thousands of people, there are hundreds of thousands of small businesses like mine that employ the majority of Americans.

  I planned on not blogging much about politics, but on this one, I just feel like I have to help inform others. Obama claims that he will not raise taxes on small businesses "making" less than $250,000 a year. He's very careful in not stating whether that's net or gross, but it turns out he is indeed referring to gross.

  We have owned our business for nearly 13 years now. Last year was the best year we have ever had, and we just cleared the $500,000 mark on our gross revenues. What Obama, the attorney, doesn't understand, is that the majority of that revenue goes right back out the door to pay for the cost of goods sold, payroll, utilities and rent, the cost of leasing equipment, etc. I think the most gross profit the business has shown at the end of the year has been $7,000.

  I need to clarify that John and I consider ourselves employees and we do cut ourselves paychecks, which comes off the gross profits. Even still, we manage to live on (I hope my husband forgives me for making this public) $48,000 a year between the two of us. We cannot afford to buy our own health insurance now because of health issues we developed back when we were making even less per year, let alone be forced to pay for health care for our other employees, too. In the past few years, we have managed to add Aflac to the benefit at work, which is better than nothing, but still not a true health care plan. It would cost us over $500 per month per employee to get each of them on some kind of real health care plan, and that doesn't include their families. Group health care requires 75% participation from employees. When there is only 4 of us (we had 7 at the beginning of the year), that means that we all have to participate because John and I are married.

  Republicans have been trying to get a Small Group Health Care Plan going for years now, unfortunately, the Democrats would rather see universal health care. Ask the people in Canada and the United Kingdom how great socialized medicine is. Most of them will tell you horror stories of not being able to get decent treatment, waiting months on end for an appointment with a specialist while your disease progresses further and further, etc.

  I don't think either of the candidates has a health plan worth tooting a horn over. I think we'd be far better off to bring down the costs of seeing the doctor and paying for prescriptions than we would be to have the government pay for everyone's. I pay my own way at the moment, paying $100 here and $50 there on some of our bigger medical bills. It would be a whole lot easier to do if doctors couldn't get away with charging $500 for an emergency room visit that they didn't even spend a total of 15 minutes with you. That doesn't include the hospital or lab bills that came along with it, too.

  I think I've blogged too long, so I'll step off my soap box for now.

  • 2:46 pm
  • 2 Comments