Poor Joe got more attention than he was figuring on, but perhaps that's fitting because his intention was to "corner" and embarrass Obama, based upon his complete misunderstanding of Obama's actual tax policy.

Joe is typical of a large number of right-leaning American voters who have been regularly voting against their own economic interests for a number of interrelated reasons encouraged by the neoconservative propaganda machine: "social conservative" considerations related to religion and/or sexuality, a general prejudice against the less affluent population based upon the completely false assumption that the beneficiaries of various progressive programs would be people other than themselves (specifially, people of racial/ethnic groups other than their own), and most tellingly, fantasizing that one is likely to (1) get rich and then (2) benefit from Republican policies favoring the rich (which of course are currently making it especially unlikely that he'll ever be able to pull himself up by his bootstraps).

It may or may not be remotely possible for Joe to buy his boss's business; first of all, the boss will need to be in a position to sell out and retire, which may be problematic in these hard times.

But even granting that Joe might be able to achieve his ambition, he's taking a very long leap of faith when he's worried about earning a net income of more than a quarter-million dollars from a business whose current gross is not much more than that, and then worrying about the "extra" taxes he might have to pay after he becomes several times more affluent than he is today.

It would make a lot more sense for Joe to base his opinion and his vote upon his current real-life economic situation, which is one that he shares with the vast majority of Americans, black and white alike.

He may be sufficiently deluded to still believe in the "trickle-down" theory, which is basically a scare tactic: you'd better agree to ever-more-favorable treatment for the already-overprivileged, or else they'll quit providing jobs for you to hold.

If the current crisis hasn't served to shake people's faith in that shopworn neoconservative myrh, I don't know what will.