Joe the Plumber on the Harbour Bridge

Oct 18, 2008 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Can you make an analogy between these two stories – Joe the Plumber and John McCain and President Jagdeo and the deteriorating Harbour Bridge? On the surface, it appears that there is nothing connecting them.

They each tell a different logic about how politicians try as much as possible to get water from the driest of rocks. I will attempt to show that both Mc Cain and Bharrat Jagdeo had the same motive in mind when they made their respective pronouncements.

Let’s start with Joe the Plumber. If you don’t know what that is all about, it happened when Barack Obama was campaigning in Ohio. This guy, whose middle name is Joe, came up to Mr. Obama and criticised his tax plan.

He told Mr. Obama that his tax plan would work against a small man like him. He is a plumber who wants to buy a small business but Mr. Obama’s intention to raise taxes would mean that small-sized entities like his plumbing outfit would bear the burden of Mr. Obama’s projection.

McCain jumped on the case, adopted Joe the Plumber, and told Americans that people like Joe the Plumber would not survive the presidency of Mr. Obama.

The financial analysts then put Joe the Plumber under the microscope. When you examine his earnings, Mc Cain’s tax proposals are more inimical to Joe’s economic bracket.

In what has to be one of the most hilarious moments on the election trail, Obama told a campaign rally that Mc Cain’s tax breaks favour the rich and the very rich but McCain has now included Joe the Plumber.

Then Obama asked the crowd which plumber earns a quarter of a million dollars yearly. The consensus among political analysts is that the Joe the Plumber story backfired on McCain.

He chose Joe the Plumber to score points on Obama. But the truth is that Mc Cain and his party, at the ideological level, support tax concessions for the wealthy classes.

It is based on Reaganomics or the trickle down concept. When the wealthy classes get more finance, they invest bigger, and the poorer classes gain from the additional money floating around.

I once used the term voodoo economics to describe that kind of theoretical approach to wealth distribution.
Then I saw a letter in the Stabroek News by Eusi Kwayana chastising me for the derogatory use of the term, “voodoo.” Kwayana let me know that “voodoo” is the culture of a particular group of people in a country in the global community. I apologised to this Guyanese giant. So now I will use the description of jumbie economics to describe Reaganomics.

The trickle down effect has not been successful. Guyana’s Economic Recovery Programme, started under President Hoyte and which the Jagdeo Government uses as its guideline, is a form of trickle down economics.

The similarity with McCain’s Joe the Plumber fiasco and President Jagdeo’s exclamation that the Harbour Bridge’s deterioration is almost criminal is that Mr. Jagdeo wants to obfuscate his micromanagement obsession by laying the blame on his subordinates.

Two points need to be raised about Joe the Plumber on the Harbour Bridge. One is that Mr. Jagdeo goes about directly making choices for top public sector assignments.

I was involved in opposing this type of presidential insistence on three occasions. I saw the damage presidential insistence did to the physiology and chemistry of this nation.

The media knows how the administrators at GWI, GPL, GRA, Forestry Commission, NCN, GuySuCo and dozens of other public sector entities are chosen. Remember what happened to Ingrid Griffith as Trade Administrator at GRA?

We know what happened to four senior officers in the army. So who is to be blamed for the slow start at Skeldon, the lack of performance at GPL and the Harbour Bridge?

Secondly, has it ever occurred to President Jagdeo that the Bridge, GPL, the new sugar factory at Skeldon and many more structures will rot because the underlings may be scared to act because they are waiting for presidential intervention?

I know two of President Jagdeo’s lieutenants who acted while the President was away. They made an appointment. Mr. Jagdeo touched down from New York the Thursday night.

The next day, there was a Cabinet meeting (yes on Friday) and the appointment was reversed. Guyanese would be shocked to know how vital to Guyana the position I am referring to here is.

Mr. Bruce Golding, the Jamaican Prime Minister, has a description for Guyana. He calls us a panhandler. We beg the international community for aid to set up institutions to help national development.

We kill the institutions by putting incompetents to run them. They collapse and we go back and beg for more.

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Joe the Plumber on the Harbour Bridge

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