What A "Moderate" Democratic Candidate Looks Like: Mike Bloomberg?

A new (January 10) Des Moines Register poll shows Bernie Sanders starting to pull away from the field at 20%, with Elizabeth Warren second (17%), and Pete Buttagieg suddenly down 9 points to 16%. Is the Democratic nomination battle really going to come down to just crazy versus crazier?

But, you say, there’s Joe Biden. He’s stuck at 15% in the Register poll, although perhaps will do better in subsequent states like South Carolina. But is he really a moderate? Among other things, Biden has endorsed the total socialist restructuring of the U.S. economy known as the Green New Deal; the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of blue collar jobs for the green dream; and the jailing of fossil fuel executives. Not a lot of moderation there.

So today, let’s take a look at Mike Bloomberg. He’s not running in Iowa, but is putting big money into the race in California that follows a few weeks later. He was a fairly decent Mayor of New York for twelve years, despite some totalitarian urges like cracking down on sodas and salt. But then, in the Mayor job he didn’t have access to the seemingly infinite pile of federal loot that somehow causes politicians to let loose with their most destructive instincts. What is he proposing now?

Here’s my favorite of Mike’s crop of proposals: A War on Poverty! I’m not making this up. Bloomberg gave his first California speech in Stockton on December 11. The AP’s account of his talk contained this nugget:

“As president, my job will be to move all Americans ahead, and that includes committing our country to new and innovative ways to combat poverty. There has to be a war on poverty,” the New York billionaire said while campaigning in Stockton.

Could this guy really not know that we are already in the middle of the War on Poverty? Indeed, the federal government has been fighting a War on Poverty — the endless and unwinable War on Poverty — with no notable success for some 56 years. That’s a multiple of the 19 years that we have been fighting in Afghanistan. The War on Poverty was first declared by Lyndon Johnson in his 1964 State of the Union address. Johnson naively thought that poverty could be eradicated by federal spending programs over the course of just a few years. Fifty-six years in, the official “poverty rate” has declined only marginally; and, since the population has nearly doubled, the number of people said to be in poverty is actually substantially more than it was when the “War” began. Meanwhile, spending on so-called “anti-poverty” programs has exploded, from just a few billion dollars per year at the beginning, to well over a trillion dollars per year today (including federal, state and local spending). Here is a Congressional budget document from June 2019 that puts federal means-tested anti-poverty spending for the 2020 fiscal year at $791 billion. State and local governments add multiple additional hundreds of billions.

So does Bloomberg propose to get rid of this enormous pile of wasteful and counterproductive spending and replace it with something that might work at least a little? Don’t be silly; that’s not how this works. Like all liberal politicians, Mike’s proposals take all current spending as a given without ever mentioning the failure, and then add more and yet more of exactly what we know does not work. On January 9, Bloomberg had an op-ed in the Chicago Tribune, co-authored with former Obama Education Secretary Arne Duncan. Excerpts:

The truth is: The economy is badly broken for the vast majority of Americans across the vast majority of the country.

And how does he plan to beat the results provided by an economy with our current 3.5% unemployment rate? With new job training programs. Really:

This week, one of us (Bloomberg) was on the South Side of Chicago to announce a new strategy for creating more good jobs in more places across the country where they are needed most — while at the same time investing in the people of those communities, to ensure that they have access to the education and training they need to qualify for the jobs. We both have seen how effective job training and apprenticeships can change the trajectory of a young person’s life.

You would be hard-pressed to come up with any more glaring example of the failure of well-intentioned federal programs than that of the job training programs. Here is a Report from the Council of Economic Advisors on the various federal job training programs from June 2019. The Report identifies some 43 — yes, 43 — existing federal job training programs, spread across nine different federal agencies — 19 in the Department of Labor, 7 in the Department of Education, 7 in HHS, and so forth. Spending on these programs has persistently increased, going recently from about $16 billion annually in 2015 to $19 billion in 2019. As to effectiveness, there is this from page 14 as to the two biggest Department of Labor programs under the “Workforce Investment Act”:

In summary, there was no effect of training (Full WIA) on earnings when combined with Core and Intensive services for either Adult or Dislocated workers for either earnings data source. The cost-benefit analysis using the survey data showed that intensive services had a positive net benefit to society as a whole but that training had a negative net benefit.

And there are plenty of other similar conclusions for others of the myriad of programs. But Mike thinks that his new programs will be better designed by smarter people, and therefore they will really work this time. Sure.

And speaking of doubling down on disaster, Mike’s other big idea to cure poverty is more federal subsidies for public housing. Really. From the AP report on Bloomberg’s December 11 speech in Stockton:

In Bloomberg’s inequality plan, he’s proposing expanding tax credits to build low-income housing, increasing federal spending on public housing and launching a $10 billion competitive program to encourage cities to ease zoning restrictions that govern where and how developers can build. Proposals in the California Legislature to ease restrictive zoning, which critics say contribute to the state’s housing crisis, have failed.

It was all the way back in January 2013 (only a few months into this blog’s existence) that I dubbed public housing subsidies “the most expensive possible way to help the smallest number of people”:

Even if you completely accept the idea that it is the government's job to cure all inequality by taxing and spending, public housing has to be the most expensive possible way to help the smallest number of people.  Indeed, even the word "help" is dubious here, because subsidized housing functions as a poverty trap for the people who manage to get in.

Seven years and dozens of MC articles on this subject later, Bloomberg still hasn’t caught on. Don’t worry, I’m sure that none of the other candidates for the Democratic nomination has either. Meanwhile, the one housing idea in Bloomberg’s list that might actually work — easing restrictive zoning — is not a federal responsibility and has already been soundly rejected in progressive stronghold California.

And I haven’t even started on Bloomberg’s proposals on “climate change” and gun control. Needless to say, he is an activist for both causes. Here’s a link to his big plan to eliminate fossil fuels from electricity generation in the U.S. by 2030. Does he realize that the U.S. is only 4% of world population, and 16% of world greenhouse gas emissions? China, India and Africa — together representing more than ten times U.S. population and over 50% of world population — are in the process of building hundreds of new coal plants and increasing their emissions by far more than the U.S. total. Meanwhile, we’ll be going over to “100% clean energy” — presumably intermittent and ultimately useless wind and solar. Try to read Bloomberg’s website and see if you can get a clue how all of this is supposed to work. You won’t find it. It’s all innumerate madness.

Yes, that is what passes for “moderate” in the Democratic primaries.