Please Help John McCain!

Let me begin this post by stating categorically, I know exactly how many houses I own--one. And, sadly, actually, not all of one. About 75% of one at this point. The bank owns the rest. I'll hazard a guess that I'm more similar to 99.9% of American than those who own so many homes they can't keep track without having some staff dig up the relevant facts. Ahem.

But this certainly does not disqualify John McCain from the Presidency. In my view, it's fine to have a wealthy plutocrat as President who is so rich he can't keep track of the number of houses he owns. I'm sure he'll work devishly hard to ensure tax breaks for middle class Americans as a result of all that 'middle class' experience.

The only real question will be, where he considers the dividing line between being truly 'wealthy' or 'well off' and 'middle class'. Luckily, we have an answer for that. According to Senator McCain, if you make more than 5 million dollars a year you are sufficiently wealthy to be called 'well off', if you make less than that, you are 'middle class'...that means if you only make 4 million a year, you are middle class, same with 3 million, 2 million, 1 million, etc...

Just hazarding a guess here, but I'd lay even odds that 99% of Americans make considerably less than 4 million a year. In fact, those that make 5 million dollars a year are at the .0001 percentile, that is, only 1 out of every 1000 Americans will make 5 million dollars.

But that's really not relevant, because there have been lots of wealthy guys in the Presidency and, in some instances, they've treated the middle class and lower classes fairly well. Unfortunately, this appears not to be the case with John McCain. In fact, if you think you might be one of those lucky duckies earning above the magical 5 million dollar mark, you might want to help John McCain out with his help. Why is that? Well according to this politico report, poor John he has to pay a little over $273,000 a year just to pay off his local resident custodians, and gardeners, chauffers and misc. homemaker types for the 10 houses and condos he actually owns. What's surprising really is that the number is so small. Let's do a little math-- if you have 10 homes and each home just has one employee taking care of it, that means, that employee will only make $27,300 dollars a year. Wow! That's not much money -- in fact, the official poverty level for a family in the US is ... $21,027. So if John McCain has only one person attending each of his 10 homes throughout the year, at minimum he is paying each of them just $6000 above the US poverty level.

But, of course, for bleeding heart liberals such as myself, that poverty level disastrously underestimates the real cost of just trying to survive in this country--especially when you add in things like food and transportattion inflation and soaring health care costs. $27,300 is just barely scraping by. And, of course, I think we can reasonably ask is John McCain really only hiring 1 single individual to maintain each of his 10 little McMansions and condos? Likely not. In fact, if he's just hiring two person per home that means he's paying way, way below poverty level for his help. If the labor cost were evenly divided between those 20 employees they would make only $13,650 a year--or approximately $6000 below the official US poverty level.

Maybe we should all pitch in and send some money to John McCain? Obviously his 100 million dollars of wealth isn't sufficient to keep his own laborers from scraping the bottom of the barrel. Just imagine how well he'd treat the rest of us (that's the 99.9% of us who do not earn 5 million a year)if he were elected. I'm sure he'd make sure everyone of us was treated at least as well as his own help.

But that's not really the point of my post. The point of my post is to help John McCain's help--because, one thing we know, if John McCain wins the Presidency, he'll be taking a big hit in his salary. You can only imagine what that will do to his domestic staff. I see future lay offs, nail biting times for those already struggling to make ends meet thanks to John McCain's idea of a pay scale. He'll simply be forced to cut back, or reduce even further the poverty wages of his employees. It's just too cruel for words really, and, let's face it, there is something concrete all of us can do to help.

We can vote for Barack Obama, so poor John McCain won't have to fire his help.


Below is a fun video that should probably go viral. Have fun.