General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsBloomberg just donated 1.8B for low and middle income students. Is he now a viable Dem candidate?
The money went to his alma mater, Johns Hopkins Univ.
This establishes education as one of his major issues. One other is climate change.
pwb
(11,245 posts)We need him.
HopeAgain
(4,407 posts)But I'm not pulling for him to win the Democratic nomination for President.
JCMach1
(27,553 posts)Bloomberg is an ally...
SoCalDem
(103,856 posts)It's really just another rich guy handing out selective largesse...
Perhaps the paying of higher taxes from ALL these fat-cats for the many decades in which they feathered their comfy nests (loopholes/deferred taxes/excused taxes etc) would have made "gifts" less necessary.
The gift to the school also puts THEM in charge of deciding who's in and who's out.
dbackjon
(6,578 posts)Johns Hopkins already has a HUGE Endowment.
vsrazdem
(2,177 posts)uponit7771
(90,301 posts)MaryMagdaline
(6,850 posts)He donated a lot to Dems across the country for the Midterms. He is strong on education and against guns.
I don't think he has strong enough political skills to get the nomination, but he is definitely an ally.
X_Digger
(18,585 posts)I don't care how much money he throws, a fundamental principle is a fundamental principle.
brush
(53,726 posts)JI7
(89,239 posts)likely to run.
and he supported stop and frisk .
brush
(53,726 posts)Hassin Bin Sober
(26,308 posts)So he wants the parents of those low and middle income kids to work till they drop. While he works in his golden years getting chauffeured around and paying someone to wipe his ass.
brush
(53,726 posts)I checked. Quixotically he's against repug tax cuts but for reigning in entitlements.
Hassin Bin Sober
(26,308 posts)https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/michael-bloomberg-isnt-a-moderate-hes-just-out-of-touch-227982/
Lets start with Social Security. According to a Pew Research survey from August, almost nobody believes Social Security benefits should be cut; the older people get, the less they like the idea. Bloomberg wants to push up the retirement age to 69 while cutting annual cost-of-living increases. This is all fine if youre a mayor or media mogul, but might not be so great if youre a construction worker building casinos for Trump.
Bloomberg also wants to increase Medicare premiums, raising co-pays in an attempt to dissuade retirees from using too many medical services. Like the Social Security cuts, this is part of what the country, in a rare moment of true bipartisanship, rejected along with the whole Simpson/Bowles plan.
As he cuts the services that ordinary people will rely on in retirement, Bloomberg also wants to raise taxes on middle-class workers. Neither Hillary Clinton nor Bernie Sanders (nor Barack Obama, for that matter) has ever proposed raising taxes on the first $250,000 of anybodys income. Bloomberg, in a 2012 op-ed for The Wall Street Journal called for raising taxes on everybodys income. Democrats, including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Sanders have declared off-limits the idea of raising taxes on the first $250,000 of income, and this seems in-step with public opinion on the matter. Bloomberg argues that you cant raise taxes on the rich high enough to dent the budget deficit, but the deficit is not actually a priority for voters from either party.
We are all in this together, wrote Bloomberg. Pitting one group against another not only divides us in counterproductive ways but offers one group the false promise of something for nothing. That is not, by any means, a moderate or middle-of-the-road view of progressive taxation.
http://www.ontheissues.org/Celeb/Mike_Bloomberg_Social_Security.htm
To reduce the deficit we must cut entitlements
Q: Your thoughts on the sequester?
BLOOMBERG: Winston Churchill once said, "You can always depend on America to do the right thing after exhausting all other possibilities." We've had a democracy for 235-odd years and it works in the end, and that's what's in important. Sequestering is here. It will go on for a while. It's not going to be the end of the world as we know it. And everybody was saying, "Oh, the worst-case scenario is exactly what we're going to implement." And now they're into the real world and they'll try to find ways to do more with less, and then hopefully Congress will come together and modify sequestering to cut things back where we can afford it and not where we can't. And keep in mind, no program to reduce the deficit makes any sense whatsoever unless you address the issue of entitlements, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, interest payment on the debt, which you can't touch, and defense spending. Everything else is tiny compared to that.