https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/michael-bloomberg-isnt-a-moderate-hes-just-out-of-touch-227982/
Let’s 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 you’re a mayor or media mogul, but might not be so great if you’re 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 anybody’s income. Bloomberg, in a 2012 op-ed for The Wall Street Journal called for raising taxes on everybody’s 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 can’t 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.
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