theintercept--2020-02-20--How Bloomberg Blew it In Las Vegas

How Bloomberg Blew it In Las Vegas

six of the remaining Democratic candidates faced off in Las Vegas ahead of the Nevada caucuses .
All eyes were @ @ @ @ @ Michael Bloomberg , who , despite sitting out the early contests and appearing in none @ @ @ @ @ has surged in many polls thanks to a relentless self-funded ad campaign .
Would he @ @ @ @ @ hype ?
In a word , no .
Bloomberg was unprepared for the barrage of @ @ @ @ @ sides , and suffered especially from a set of withering takedowns at the hands of @ @ @ @ @ Intercept DC bureau chief Ryan Grim joins Mehdi Hasan to discuss Bloomberg ’ s debut @ @ @ @ @ might affect the race going forward .

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On Wednesday night, six of the remaining Democratic candidates faced off in Las Vegas ahead of the Nevada caucuses. All eyes were on former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who, despite sitting out the early contests and appearing in none of the previous debates, has surged in many polls thanks to a relentless, self-funded ad campaign. Would he live up to his own hype?
In a word, no. Bloomberg was unprepared for the barrage of attacks he faced from all sides and suffered especially from a set of withering takedowns at the hands of Sen. Elizabeth Warren. The Intercept’s D.C. Bureau Chief Ryan Grim joins Mehdi Hasan to discuss Bloomberg’s debut performance and how the debate might affect the race going forward.
Elizabeth Warren: We are not going to beat Donald Trump with a man who has who knows how many non-disclosure agreements and the drip, drip, drip of stories of women saying they have been harassed and discriminated against.
Mehdi Hasan: Welcome to Deconstructed. I’m Mehdi Hasan. And that was Senator Elizabeth Warren, at the ninth democratic debate in Las Vegas, which unlike the other eight was actually a debate.
Pete Buttigieg: You’re on the committee that oversees border security. And we’re not able to speak to literally the first thing about the politics of the country to our south.
Amy Klobuchar: Are you trying to say that I’m dumb? Are you mocking me here, Pete?
MH: So who won the debate? Was it just Warren? Warren and Sanders? And what happened to the man from the ads, the man with the billions former Republican mayor of New York Michael Bloomberg?
Bernie Sanders: Mr. Bloomberg had policies in New York City of stop and frisk, which went after African American and Latino people in an outrageous way.
AK: I think we need something different than Donald Trump. I don’t think you look at Donald Trump and say, “We need someone richer in the White House.”
EW: I’d like to talk about who we’re running against: a billionaire who calls women “fat broads” and “horse-faced lesbians”. And no, I’m not talking about Donald Trump. I’m talking about Mayor Bloomberg.
MH: That’s how last night’s debate kicked off. Literally the first thing that Bernie Sanders and Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren did was to go after their newest on stage rival. So question, why did Michael Bloomberg the eighth richest man in America, the former mayor of the country’s biggest city, who successfully and astonishing zoomed into third place nationally, is leading in Florida and a handful of other Super Tuesday states thanks to hundreds of millions of dollars in endless ad buys on TV and online, why did he turn up for this ninth Democratic presidential debate in Las Vegas last night? What did he think was gonna happen? Why didn’t he just stay home at the mansion and watch it on TV with the rest of us while planning his next advertising blitz?
Because that debate was kind of a disaster for the billionaire from New York. Here’s a man who’s been pretending to have Barack Obama’s endorsement on TV, who’s been pretending to be a Democrat since 2018, who’s been pretending that he’s a Trump hater, when in fact, he’s on record saying:
Michael Bloomberg: I know Donald Trump. He’s a great guy. He doesn’t do everything he says, but he sure tries and I’m a big fan of Donald Trump.
MH: Last year, Bloomberg said he didn’t want to run for president because of all the apologizing he might have to do.
MB: It’s just not going to happen on a national level for somebody like me starting where I am, unless I was willing to change all my views and go on what CNN called “an apology tour”.
MH: Last night, though, he had to offer a pretty half-hearted apology for his terrorizing of black and brown people in New York via stop and frisk.
MB: If I go back and look at my time in office, the one thing that I’m really worried about, embarrassed about was how it turned out with stop and frisk. We adopted a policy which had been in place, the policy that all big police departments use of stop and frisk. What happened, however, was it got out of control.
MH: He didn’t, however, have to apologize for his spying on Muslims because nobody gives a damn about Muslims. Still, it turns out when you put him on stage and allow his rivals to take shots at him, and when you see how unprepared he is for those attacks, how robotic and charisma-free he is, well, he doesn’t look all that inevitable, despite the billions at his disposal. I mean, you think he’d have come prepared to deal with all the expected and very legitimate attacks on his wealth, on his billionaire status from the likes of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders and even, even from NBC’s Chuck Todd.
Chuck Todd: Should you have earned that much money?
MB: Yes, I worked very hard for it. And I’m giving it away.
MH: Sorry, if someone asks you why you’re so filthy rich and you’re running for office, you don’t say it’s because you worked hard, implying therefore the poor people are poor because they don’t work hard or don’t work as hard as you. Yeah, tell that to a single mother working two minimum wage jobs or someone who has to stay at home to care for an elderly or sick parent. Tell them that, Mike. Thankfully, though, Senator Elizabeth Warren was on fire last night, mainly again, at Bloomberg’s expense.
EW: When the mayor says that he apologized, listen closely to the apology. The language he used is about stop and frisk. It’s about how it turned out. Now this isn’t about how it turned out. This is about what it was designed to do to begin with. It targeted communities of color. It targeted black and brown men from the beginning. You need a different apology.
Lester Holt: Senator, thank you.
MH: Those people who are quick to write Warren off in recent weeks might want to think twice this morning. She’s very good at debates. She just hasn’t been very good at winning primaries, so far. So will this debate lead to a shift in the polls? The polls remember that are currently showing Bernie Sanders, the clear leader in both, Nevada which votes this weekend and nationally where Sanders is 16 points ahead of Joe Biden in second place in the latest Washington Post/ABC opinion poll. By the way, and this is kind of important when all of the candidates were asked towards the end whether they thought the candidate who arrives at the Democratic Convention in Milwaukee in July with the most pledged delegates should win the nomination, all of Bernie’s rivals said no and only Bernie said yes.
BS: Well, the process includes 500 super delegates on the second ballot. So I think that the will of the people should prevail, yes. The person with the most votes should become the nominee.
MH: They’re scared of Bernie, scared of him winning, no doubt about it. And they’re scared of Bloomberg too. Understandably, he has unlimited resources. So last night was supposed to be the night where the other candidates tried to take both Bernie and Bloomberg down. But did they?
[Music interlude.]
MH: I’m joined now to discuss the Last Vegas debate with The Intercept’s D.C. bureau chief, my good friend and a regular guest on the show, Ryan Grim. Ryan, thanks for joining me on Deconstructed.
Ryan Grim: Thanks for having me here.
MH: Ryan, let’s get straight to it. Who was the winner of the debate, in your view? Was there a winner?
RG: Well, there’s kind of two winners like, history I think will mark this as one of the greatest presidential debate performances ever turned in by any presidential candidate and that’s Elizabeth Warren. But you know, paradoxically kind of the winner was Bernie Sanders because what he needs is for Bloomberg to have his momentum blunted and for the trajectory of the race to continue as it has been the last few weeks. And so he got that which you know, if your eye’s on the prize of the nomination, then he is the winner. If your question is about who won this discrete debate, then no question, Elizabeth Warren.
MH: It’s a good point because if anyone you know the proverbial Martian landing from outer space last night and watching the debate might assume that Michael Bloomberg was the front runner, in fact, he’s third nationally, hasn’t taken part in any of the primaries so far. And yet the most of the fire that was rained down was on him, not on the guy in first place. And Pete Buttigieg tried a couple of times he had his kind of pre-prep lines, where he went after Bernie on the one hand and Bloomberg on the other saying they’re not Democrat, saying one’s an extreme socialist, the other’s extreme capitalist, but the rest of them didn’t really go after Bernie at all.
RG: No, they didn’t and Bloomberg is sort of a potential front runner, you know, because he has this reserve of billions of dollars that he has promised to spend it on his own behalf.
MH: He’s only spent a few hundred million so far, only a few hundred million.
RG: Just a few hundred million.
MH: Pocket change for him.
RG: More than anybody has ever spent on a primary and he spent it in just a couple of weeks.
MH: So Michael Bloomberg turns up for this debate. He only qualified for it very late in the day. If I was Bloomberg, I wouldn’t have turned up. Why do you think he turned up?
RG: I think he turned up because he absolutely had to. You know, he’s going to take on the biggest bully on the block Donald Trump. And so if he looks like a guy who’s going to be hiding behind his money and can’t show up, you know, at a Democratic debate, then how are people going to envision him showing up at a Republican debate? So he wasn’t left with much choice, but I think, you know, he’s a smart guy. And I think in the back of his mind, he probably knew that he was better off, the longer he could stay away from these debates.
And I think that’s one reason that he actually refused contributions from the very beginning because the DNC had rules that said, in order to be in the debate, you have to meet a certain polling threshold and a certain number of donors threshold. So he figured, okay, well, as long as I take zero dollars from all people, then the DNC can’t force me onto the stage. Interestingly, it was Warren’s people, you know, Adam Green of the PCCC that kind of publicly and then privately pushed the DNC to change the rules, so that Bloomberg could get on the stage. And precisely for this reason because they know that this is the kind of villain that Warren is most effective at slaying.
MH: Oh, yeah. I saw someone tweet that, I think was Eric Levitz of New York Magazine that Elizabeth Warren was put on this earth to own Michael Bloomberg which I thought was appropriate. I mean, the thing about Bloomberg — we’ll talk about Warren in a moment. The thing about Bloomberg which amazed me as you say, he’s a smart guy. Clearly, he’s a smart guy, wouldn’t have gotten to where he is in life if he wasn’t a smart guy. And he’s surrounded himself with some smart people. Tim O’Brien, former colleague of yours and mine, Howard Wilson, other people who have kind of worked in campaigns or worked in the media. And he’s got this far, quite quickly, you know, third nationally, first in Florida, almost come out of nowhere. That’s impressive. And then you see him turn up for this debate, where as you say he knew, you know, he had to turn up, he knew he was going to get attacked by the likes of Elizabeth Warren. He seemed unprepared, to me. Or maybe it wasn’t lack of preparation. Maybe it’s just in his constitution that he’s unable to take criticism or deal with criticism. I guess if you’re a billionaire, who’s run your own company and then run a major city you surround yourself with yes men, you’ve never really had to put up with criticism.
RG: I think that’s a big part of it. And when we say he’s a smart guy, you know, there are 10s of millions of smart guys and smart women in this country. He’s not a uniquely talented person. What he did is he created a box that sits on the desks of financial titans that he charges them, you know, extraordinary annual fees for and he benefits from these network effects. The reason that you use a Bloomberg terminal is not because it’s the best device that anybody could create. It’s because everybody else uses a Bloomberg terminal. You’re not on Facebook because you absolutely love Facebook, people are on Facebook because other people are on Facebook.
MH: First mover advantage —
RG: Right, so he’s the guy that made those boxes. That doesn’t make him some unique figure. And so I think that the gap between the quality of his ads that Democratic primary voters have been watching and his —
MH: Very good ads.
RG: Excellent ads, the best ads that money can buy, quite literally. The gap between those ads and his performance is going to be jarring to a lot of people.
MH: Although how many people would have seen it, I guess, this classic question we ask after every debate is, how will the “media” and Deconstructed, we, Intercept a part of that, how much of our coverage will drive what Democratic voters then do in terms of you know, we’ve looked for bumps in the polling after debates. Will Elizabeth Warren get a big bump because she clearly had a good night? Will we see Bloomberg a little bit even fade? Because a lot of Democratic voters, as you say, have seen these ads. I know people, elderly voters who have said to me, who have said to you know, their kids who are friends of mine, saying, you know, I like Bloomberg because he’s friends with Obama because they’ve seen all these ads where he makes it look —
RG: He’s endorsed by Obama.
MH: Yeah, as if he’s endorsed by Obama. And if they’ve actually watched the debate, they’ll have seen Obama’s vice president go after him. They’ll have seen Sanders and Warren go after him. Pretty much everyone on the stage went after him. Will that dent his popularity do you think?
RG: I think it will now because the question that every Democratic primary voter has who is open to supporting Mike Bloomberg is can they beat Donald Trump? And so a lot of those people are either watching pieces of that debate, or they’re going to see the viral clips that that come out of the debate of Warren kind of eviscerating him. And then they’re going to picture Michael Bloomberg on the stage with Donald Trump and say to themselves, you know what? Maybe I was wrong. Like, I hoped that Mike Bloomberg was going to be the easy answer to this quandary that we’ve been facing for years. But you know, clearly, you know, he’s not the guy.
MH: He’s not the guy. He’s the guy who’s rolling his eyes when he’s put under pressure by his fellow Democrats. I mean, I personally, a discussion for another time — I wonder whether Donald Trump will even turn up for a debate with whoever the Democrat —
RG: He’ll certainly tease it because he loves the drama.
MH: But he’s a coward fundamentally, and he’s already laying the groundwork to avoid the debates by claiming the commission is biased against him. But just, you mentioned Warren a few times. Let’s talk Elizabeth Warren. Ryan, I think it’s fair to say you and I are among the tiny handful of journalists in this town who have constantly said don’t write off Elizabeth Warren. She was very, very strong last night. This is what she was kind of born to do. She’s very good at debating. We’ve seen her in the Senate cross examining a range of kind of billionaire baddies from the banks. So, it wasn’t surprising that she came out strongest of all the candidates, including Bernie, against Michael Bloomberg.
RG: Right, the calendar is tough for her. You know, there have already been about 70,000 early votes cast in Nevada. You know, this was the debate for the Nevada caucuses. In 2016, there were 86,000 votes cast total. And so, you know, those 70,000 people, a significant chunk of them presumably voted for Bernie Sanders, given what people were reporting from the —
MH: Before last night’s debate.
RG: Right, exactly before last night’s debate.
MH: And she wasn’t doing well before last night, let’s be very clear about that. She didn’t perform as well as the campaign had hoped she would in those first two states especially in New Hampshire, which is neighboring her own state. A lot of her supporters have claimed erasure by the media. Do you buy that, that she’s been kind of ignored by the media?
RG: Certainly, compared to I think Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg. They have a very good case to make because I think you could argue that neither of them should be taken seriously at all as candidates given that they have less than 5% support among black and brown voters. This is Klobuchar and Buttigieg and so you’re heading into Nevada and South Carolina, and then Super Tuesday. So where on earth is their path to victory where at least Elizabeth Warren, you know, had a plausible path and, you know, so to spend the scarce media resources that you have on Klobuchar and Buttigieg rather than Warren. It, I think is unfair. But yeah, she got killed in New Hampshire and I think Warren supporters need to grapple with that.
MH: And although you’re right to say that the media exposure for Buttigieg and Klobuchar has been too high relative to their chances, and it’s almost certainly driven by the fact that they’re “moderate centrist” who a lot of mainstream media pundits love. I was just on CNN a couple days ago Bill Kristol, who was singing Amy Klobuchar’s praises. Having said that, after tonight’s debate, it’s fair to say that Klobuchar and Buttigieg could have their own spin off series, couldn’t they? There were some great moments where they just savaged each other. They’ve clearly proven in previous debates that they don’t like each other. I think she had the upper hand in most of the debates leading up to last night where she really kind of got in good digs against Mayor Pete and his inexperience in previous debates. Although I think last night he really, really got under her skin.
RG: Yeah, oh, he’s always under her skin. You know, she looks at him like he’s a member of her staff.
MH: Hasn’t thrown anything at him yet, but she looked like she wanted to last night.
RG: Oh, she very desperately wanted to throw something at him. She just straight up told him, all you’ve done is memorize a bunch of talking points.
MH: Kind of true.
RG: And she went back to a line that she had used a devastating effect on him earlier. But like Klobuchar has a little bit of the kind of Trump language problem where she’ll deliver like a piece of the sentence and not the entire sentence. And so, in the earlier debate, she had hinted at how, look, yes, it’s fair to say that you’re a tough politician, if you’ve won as a gay Democrat statewide in Indiana, but you haven’t, you know, you lost badly. So, but she kind of butchered it a little bit the first time she tried it. So she went back to it this time, and reminded people that he had run statewide in Indiana and lost by 20 points. And then she added the point that he lost to the guy who then himself later lost to a Democrat in a Senate race, so it was not in an unwinnable race.
MH: But it was really, it was Buttigieg who really got some blows in on her I thought last night when he pointed out the fact that she didn’t know the Mexican president’s name. There was that painful exchange on Telemundo last week where she couldn’t name the president of Mexico. She dug herself deeper and deeper into a hole. Last night, she claimed it was you know, oh, I just forgot it. It was a momentary lapse which it clearly wasn’t. He managed to lay a blow on her there about that. He then went off to her record on voting for Trump judges. She has one of the worst, if not the worst records, I think in the Senate, when it comes to voting for Trump judges. And at the end of the debate, I’m not sure how many people notice this. She seemed to rush off the stage. She didn’t stay to talk to any of the other candidates. She dodged shaking Buttigieg’s hand. I don’t know if she went off stage to break some things. But she left in a hurry. It seems like he really, really got under her skin.
RG: Although, did you notice, did she look down at her notes when she said Lopez Obrador?
MH: I need to go back and check the tape. It’s a good question. I saw people tweeting suggesting that even last night, she wasn’t quite sure about the president’s name.
RG: Yeah, it very much like, to me, she said, I remember and I would like to apologize to and then she glanced down at her notes and then said, Lopez Obrador. I think she on her notes, she probably had Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. And then she looked at her notes and said, let’s just do Lopez Obrador. I don’t know why her staff didn’t just tell her to do AMLO. But actually, when it comes to her staff, the answer is because her staff is afraid of her.
MH: And I think we’re going to hear less and less about the Klobuchar surge. From kind of today onwards, I suspect, after every debate, you’ve had kind of “moderate pundits” trying to kind of make her surge happen. She did do better than expected in the Iowa, New Hampshire caucus and the primaries, no doubt about that. But nationally, she’s still weak, and I don’t see where she goes from here. Obviously, Buttigieg thought he could take some of her votes. But you know, she got very annoyed, Amy Klobuchar, about Bloomberg and his campaign suggesting that her, Biden and Buttigieg should get out of the way, but a lot of Democrats up until last night were probably thinking that because the three of them haven’t been able to take out Bernie on their own so far.
RG: Right, Democrats, you know, who want a kind of moderate nominee or who want a nominee who they believe can beat Donald Trump, they definitely want everyone to get out. Except nobody agrees on who is going to get out. You know, he’s trying to pull off some smoke filled room thing in front of like the entire country. And that’s just not how this works.
MH: It’s funny you mention the smoke filled room because of course, towards the end, there was this crucial moment where all of them were asked. And it reminded me of that moment in 2016, kind of when similar things happened in the Republican party where kind of 16 republicans couldn’t defeat Trump together, none of them would get out of the way so that, you know, the party could unite around one person to defeat him. He benefited from that division hugely, in a way and I hate to make this analogy because Bernie’s not Trump, but in a similar way, Bernie is been fitting. But when they were asked last night about, you know what happens at the convention if none of them turn up with a majority of pledged delegates, should the person with a plurality with the most delegates, even if it’s not a majority, should they win the nomination? Surprise, surprise, only Bernie said yes, every single other candidate on stage said no. Maybe the person who doesn’t show up with the most delegates becomes the nominee, that would be chaos, would it not?
RG: It would be you know, and a politician’s view on process is completely determined by what outcome that process could lead to. I mean, even toward the end of the 2016 campaign, Bernie Sanders started arguing that super delegates ought to support him because he was polling better head to head even though he was behind in pledged delegates. You know, there is no sanctity around process around any politicians.
MH: They are politicians for a reason.
RG: Right and Chuck Todd was right to say, Bernie, I’ll take you last on this one because I know where you are, which shows that Chuck Todd who just a few days ago was laughing at the idea that Bernie Sanders is the front runner is now basically conceding that he’s the one who’s most likely to come into the convention with the most delegates with the only question being does he have 50% plus one that locks it up? Or is it a plurality?
MH: Do you believe, sorry, to put the prediction gun to your head, but do you believe that anyone can turn up to this convention in Milwaukee, in the summer with a majority of pledged delegates?
RG: The irony is that the only person who can at this point is Bernie Sanders. Like there is a path that he has to that if he wins Nevada, then pulls off an upset in South Carolina which is looking increasingly possible for him and then, you know, it locks in half the delegates on Super Tuesday. That you know, that pushes a lot of people out of the race, makes him the presumptive front runner. And he is then within striking distance of getting an actual majority of pledged delegates. There’s nobody else that you can kind of craft a scenario that doesn’t involve, you know, lightning striking dead the rest of the candidates.
MH: You’re telling me that you don’t think Klobuchar can turn up with 50% plus one?
RG: No, I think the Klobu-mentum is finally going to meet non-white voters. And a strong fifth isn’t going to get you there.
MH: It’s gonna be fascinating to see people who kind of first, you remember, the Democrats went on and on about popular vote and Trump and then Iowa happened and suddenly Bernie’s popular vote lead wasn’t that important, or now it’s going to be or the person with the most delegates or most votes in the primaries doesn’t have to be the nominee. Let’s see what super delegates do in the second round when they’re free to vote as Bernie pointed out tonight. What’s interesting, I think, Ryan, is that you have a lot of people in the media, a lot of people in the “Democratic party establishment” talking about how divisive and chaotic it’s going to be, how many people want to stop Bernie, and you look at the polls, average Democratic party voters don’t necessarily want to stop Bernie. He’s actually hugely popular with Democrats across the board. He has the highest approval rating amongst Democrats. And the most recent polls show that he’s increased his support amongst African Americans, among voters under 50, among conservative Democrats, too. People quite like Bernie as a second choice.
RG: Yeah, one of the biggest analytical errors that pundits make is when they refer to people as moderate voters. Say, well, there’s, you know, 75% of moderate voters here. And then you have 25% of Bernie voters or sometimes they’ll add together Bernie voters and Warren voters. But there aren’t moderate voters. They are voters who have decided at that moment that they are supporting a candidate that the media is considering to be moderate. But that doesn’t mean that they themselves are moderate. They may have a lot of different reasons for supporting that particular candidate. And the most likely reason is they believe that that candidate is the one most likely to beat Donald Trump. And that might mean that they actually agree with Bernie Sanders on his policy message, but they just think that he can’t win. So if Bernie Sanders continues to win then they move to him.
MH: Agree, but I would go even further. I would say it’s not just about his policy message. It’s about the fact that they quite like Bernie Sanders. They don’t hate him, or despise him or see him as you know, an Armageddon candidate in the way that some in the media or Pete Buttigieg last night are trying to suggest that he is and there was a great exchange where one of the moderators said, oh, Bernie, people don’t like socialism in a recent poll, and Bernie’s great comeback was, but who was winning in that poll? He was. Which I think is a very important point that’s overlooked and therefore you get all these artificial debates about how do you stop Bernie, socialism. Bernie bros were a big chunk of last night’s debate, dedicated to kind of his horrible supporters online. And yet, not a single minute of last night’s debate was devoted to foreign policy. The president of the United States has massive control over the world’s strongest military. And yet again, we had another Democratic debate, no mention of Israel Palestine, no mention of the nearly million people displaced and Syria since Christmas, many of them starving to death as we speak. No mention of what’s going on with Iran. Yeah, it was a real, real letdown. It was otherwise actually a quite strong and entertaining and important debate. But again, no foreign policy.
RG: Yeah, that was interesting that they didn’t touch on anything. And I think it comes back to how linked to the news cycle, a lot of debate moderators are. They will not bring up foreign policy in a debate if foreign policy has not been front and center in the news in the recent week. You know, I think that basically explains 100% of the reason why it didn’t come up.
MH: And I think it’s sadly, journalistic malpractice, not to bring it up. But anyways, we’ve run out of time. Ryan, thanks so much for joining me to give us all your insights on last night’s debate. I’m sure there will be many more such discussions.
RG: Well, thank you for having me.
[Music interlude.]
MH: That was The Intercept’s DC bureau chief Ryan Grim discussing last night’s debate in Las Vegas. And that’s our show. Deconstructed is a production of First Look Media and The Intercept. Our producer is Zach Young. Our theme music was composed by Bart Warshaw. Betsy Reed is The Intercept’s editor in chief.
And I’m Mehdi Hasan. You can follow me on Twitter @mehdirhasan. If you haven’t already, please do subscribe to the show so you can hear it every week. Go to theintercept.com/deconstructed to subscribe from your podcast platform of choice, iPhone, Android, whatever. If you’re subscribed already, please do leave us a rating or review – Do it. Go do it now. It helps people find the show. And if you want to give us feedback, email us at Podcasts@theintercept.com. Thanks so much! See you next week.


theintercept--2020-02-20--Facing Improbable Odds in Nevada, Elizabeth Warren Goes on the Attack Against Mike Bloomberg

When Mike Bloomberg sauntered onto the debate stage , the old Elizabeth Warren reemerged , turning in a historic debate performance that left the former New York City mayor a politically bloodied mess .
Bloomberg , it turned out , was the foil Warren needed .
That combative spirit fueled a draft-Warren campaign for president , which she resisted in 2016 .
But in the 2020 cycle , she largely sheathed her knife until Wednesday , foiled by the muddled intra-party politics of a Democratic primary in which there was no obvious villain who could match a Geithner or Sloan @ @ @ @ @ @ @ decade as a law professor tangling with Sen. Joe Biden over bankruptcy reform , she largely left him alone .
Despite having been a leader in the Senate of the push to expand rather than cut Social Security , she allowed Sen. Bernie Sanders and his campaign team to fight it out with Biden over the program .
Elizabeth Warren rose to stardom slaying villains .
The first time she was widely noticed on the national stage came with a gavel in her hand , as she pounded then-Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Elected to the Senate in 2012 , she quickly transformed her perch on the sleepy Banking Committee into a public studio that regularly produced viral videos of her slicing hapless banking regulators and Wall Street executives to pieces .
And her damning interrogation of Wells Fargo CEO Timothy Sloan was widely credited as leading to his “ resignation.
” Warren opened with a heavy hit against Bloomberg , listing his similarities to President Donald Trump .
“ I ’ d like to talk about who we ’ re running against , a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ and ‘ horse-faced lesbians.
’ I ’ m not talking about Donald Trump .
I ’ m talking about Mayor Bloomberg , ” she said , to roaring applause .
“ Democrats are not going to win if we have a nominee who has a history of hiding his tax returns , of supporting racist polls like redlining and stop-and-frisk .
I ’ ll support whoever the Democratic nominee is , but understand this : Democrats take a huge risk if we just substitute one arrogant billionaire for another.
” She went @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the debate .
Warren ’ s strong performance may turn out to be a murder-suicide : It might already be too late for Warren herself to recover in the race .
In Nevada , where the debate was held , 70,000 early votes have already been cast , compared to 86,000 total in 2016 .
She ’ s polling in the single digits here , in South Carolina , and in many Super Tuesday states .
And hundreds of thousands of people have already seen Bloomberg ’ s ads , thanks to the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ so far on digital and TV , many of which could give the impression that he ’ s been endorsed by former President Barack Obama .
And he racked up a number of endorsements from black congressional leaders and majors in the days leading up to the debate .
Sanders , the favorite in Nevada , stood to be a major beneficiary of Warren ’ s assault on Bloomberg .
The Vermont senator is threatening an upset of Biden in South Carolina and has the potential to pick up roughly half of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ could become an insurmountable delegate lead .
Earlier Wednesday , Bloomberg ’ s campaign warned of just that possibility , suggesting that to avert it , Biden , Warren , Amy Klobuchar , and Pete Buttigieg ought to drop out of the race and let Bloomberg focus on Sanders one-on-one .
Klobuchar took immediate offense to Bloomberg ’ s suggestion , and it quickly became clear that nobody on the stage planned to take his advice .
Asked at the end of the debate whether the candidate with the most delegates , even @ @ @ @ @ @ @ be the nominee going into the convention , all but Sanders demurred , seeing their path to the nomination in a contested convention .
Bloomberg made it to the debate stage for the first time after the Democratic National Committee changed its qualification threshold in January , allowing him to qualify by funding his own campaign .
Buttigieg , too , was hit hard by Warren , who said he “ makes it unclear what he stands for other than his own advancement.
” Klobuchar later seconded her , telling him , “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ points and a bunch of things.
” Warren took on the role of fact checker on Bloomberg ’ s attempts to bat away criticisms of his stop-and-frisk policy and numerous allegations of sexual harassment .
On stop and frisk , Bloomberg noted his apologies , and said he was worried and embarrassed about the impact the policy had on black and brown New York City residents .
“ There is no great answer to a lot of these problems .
And if we took off everybody that was wrong off this panel , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ at some time in their careers , there ’ d be nobody else up here , ” Bloomberg said .
“ Listen very closely to the apology , ” Warren said .
“ This isn ’ t about how it turned out .
This is about what it was designed to do to begin with .
It targeted communities of color .
It targeted black and brown men from the beginning.
” Warren wasn ’ t the only one who got in shots on Bloomberg .
NBC ’ s Hallie Jackson asked Bloomberg @ @ @ @ @ @ @ hostile work environment for women and that he had admitted to making sexually suggestive remarks .
The former mayor responded feebly by touting the percentages of women who work at Bloomberg Foundation and in his mayoral office .
“ None of them accuse me of doing anything , other than maybe they didn ’ t like a joke I told , ” he said .
The exchange gave Warren another opportunity to go after Bloomberg .
“ We are not going to beat Donald Trump with a man who has who knows how @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , referring to the unknown number of women who worked for Bloomberg who have agreed not to speak publicly about their claims of gender discrimination or sexual harassment .

Elizabeth Warren rose to stardom slaying villains. The first time she was widely noticed on the national stage came with a gavel in her hand, as she pounded then-Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner for his mishandling of the Wall Street bailout. Elected to the Senate in 2012, she quickly transformed her perch on the sleepy Banking Committee into a public studio that regularly produced viral videos of her slicing hapless banking regulators and Wall Street executives to pieces. And her damning interrogation of Wells Fargo CEO Timothy Sloan was widely credited as leading to his “resignation.”
That combative spirit fueled a draft-Warren campaign for president, which she resisted in 2016. But in the 2020 cycle, she largely sheathed her knife until Wednesday, foiled by the muddled intra-party politics of a Democratic primary in which there was no obvious villain who could match a Geithner or Sloan. Even though she had spent a decade as a law professor tangling with Sen. Joe Biden over bankruptcy reform, she largely left him alone. Despite having been a leader in the Senate of the push to expand rather than cut Social Security, she allowed Sen. Bernie Sanders and his campaign team to fight it out with Biden over the program.
When Mike Bloomberg sauntered onto the debate stage, the old Elizabeth Warren reemerged, turning in a historic debate performance that left the former New York City mayor in a politically bloodied mess. Bloomberg, it turned out, was the foil Warren needed.
Warren opened with a heavy hit against Bloomberg, listing his similarities to President Donald Trump. “I’d like to talk about who we’re running against, a billionaire who calls women ‘fat broads’ and ‘horse-faced lesbians.’ I’m not talking about Donald Trump. I’m talking about Mayor Bloomberg,” she said, to roaring applause. “Democrats are not going to win if we have a nominee who has a history of hiding his tax returns, of supporting racist polls like redlining and stop-and-frisk. I’ll support whoever the Democratic nominee is, but understand this: Democrats take a huge risk if we just substitute one arrogant billionaire for another.” She went on to attack Bloomberg in waves throughout the debate.
Warren’s strong performance may turn out to be a murder-suicide: It might already be too late for Warren herself to recover in the race. In Nevada, where the debate was held, 70,000 early votes have already been cast, compared to 86,000 total in 2016. She’s polling in the single digits here, in South Carolina, and in many Super Tuesday states. And hundreds of thousands of people have already seen Bloomberg’s ads, thanks to the $233 million he’s spent so far on digital and TV, many of which could give the impression that he’s been endorsed by former President Barack Obama. And he racked up a number of endorsements from black congressional leaders and majors in the days leading up to the debate.
Sanders, the favorite in Nevada, stood to be a major beneficiary of Warren’s assault on Bloomberg. The Vermont senator is threatening an upset of Biden in South Carolina and has the potential to pick up roughly half of the delegates on Super Tuesday, building what could become an insurmountable delegate lead.
Earlier Wednesday, Bloomberg’s campaign warned of just that possibility, suggesting that to avert it, Biden, Warren, Amy Klobuchar, and Pete Buttigieg ought to drop out of the race and let Bloomberg focus on Sanders one-on-one.
Klobuchar took immediate offense to Bloomberg’s suggestion, and it quickly became clear that nobody on the stage planned to take his advice. Asked at the end of the debate whether the candidate with the most delegates, even if short of a majority, should be the nominee going into the convention, all but Sanders demurred, seeing their path to the nomination in a contested convention.
Bloomberg made it to the debate stage for the first time after the Democratic National Committee changed its qualification threshold in January, allowing him to qualify by funding his own campaign.
Buttigieg, too, was hit hard by Warren, who said he “makes it unclear what he stands for other than his own advancement.” Klobuchar later seconded her, telling him, “You have memorized a bunch of talking points and a bunch of things.”
Warren took on the role of fact-checker on Bloomberg’s attempts to bat away criticisms of his stop-and-frisk policy and numerous allegations of sexual harassment.
On stop-and-frisk, Bloomberg noted his apologies, and said he was worried and embarrassed about the impact the policy had on black and brown New York City residents. “There is no great answer to a lot of these problems. And if we took off everybody that was wrong off this panel, everybody that was wrong on criminal justice at some time in their careers, there’d be nobody else up here,” Bloomberg said.
“Listen very closely to the apology,” Warren said. “This isn’t about how it turned out. This is about what it was designed to do to begin with. It targeted communities of color. It targeted black and brown men from the beginning.”
Warren wasn’t the only one who got in shots on Bloomberg. NBC’s Hallie Jackson asked Bloomberg about repeat allegations that he oversaw a hostile work environment for women and that he had admitted to making sexually suggestive remarks. The former mayor responded feebly by touting the percentages of women who work at Bloomberg Foundation and in his mayoral office. “None of them accuse me of doing anything, other than maybe they didn’t like a joke I told,” he said.
The exchange gave Warren another opportunity to go after Bloomberg. “We are not going to beat Donald Trump with a man who has who knows how many nondisclosure agreements,” she said, referring to the unknown number of women who worked for Bloomberg who have agreed not to speak publicly about their claims of gender discrimination or sexual harassment.
https://twitter.com/jason_howerton/status/1230324226802028550?s=21
Bloomberg said that there are “very few nondisclosure agreements,” describing them as “agreements between two parties that wanted to keep it quiet and that’s up to them.” Warren then shifted the conversation to Bloomberg’s electability, warning against “the drip, drip, drip of stories of women saying they have been harassed and discriminated against.”
When moderators pressed Klobuchar about not knowing who the Mexican president is, Warren came to her defense, saying it was just a moment of forgetfulness. “Let’s be clear, missing a name all by itself does not indicate that you do not understand what’s going on, and I just think that’s a mistake,” she said.


theintercept--2020-02-20--Bloomberg Spent a Decade Demanding Cuts to Social Security. His Campaign Plan Doesn’t Rule Them Out.

On Sunday , Bloomberg ’ s presidential campaign released his official proposal for Social Security and retirement more generally .
It ’ s written to give the impression that if elected , Bloomberg would not cut Social Security for anyone , and in fact , would expand benefits for everyone .
However , the plan leaves the door open to benefit cuts for some beneficiaries — just as Bloomberg has advocated for years .
Second , Bloomberg has no idea how Social Security works .
Instead , his head is filled with a hodgepodge of right-wing talking points about the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in .
Like many at the top of the U.S. pyramid , Bloomberg is transfixed by the idea that the U.S. and its citizens are wildly profligate and that unless we sober up , the country will someday be punished for our wantonness .
The central issue is straightforward .
The Social Security Administration projects that , mostly thanks to the retirement of the baby boomers , the cost of the program will increase from 4.9 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product in 2019 to about 5.9 percent by 2039 .
Then @ @ @ @ @ @ @ other words , if we can figure out some way to send one additional dollar out of every hundred in the American economy to retirees , there ’ s no need to cut benefits .
After decades of propaganda by the corporate right , Americans have become convinced that Social Security faces a terrifying day of reckoning .
It does not .
It does need some minor adjustments , but that ’ s something that ’ s happened many times before and is unremarkable in the context of a program that is 85 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Security is one of the simplest and most efficient programs ever created by the U.S. government .
Essentially , it deducts money from the paychecks of today ’ s workers and sends it to retirees ( plus some widows , orphans , and people with disabilities ) , providing them with a modest but completely secure income .
The current contribution rate is 12.4 percent of everyone ’ s salary up to $ 137,700 .
The lack of a straightforward disavowal of cuts from the Bloomberg campaign , combined with Bloomberg ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ significant genetics with Simpson-Bowles .
Like Bloomberg today , Simpson and Bowles proposed increasing Social Security benefits for the poorest beneficiaries .
Unlike Bloomberg , they explicitly advocated cuts that would have reduced the benefits of those further up the income ladder .
This would have reduced overall costs and made the program more like traditional welfare — an outcome that would have weakened political support for Social Security and made it vulnerable to further cuts in the future .
According to Bloomberg ’ s proposal , “ Mike will strengthen entitlement programs.
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ of minor benefit increases and significant cuts would “ strengthen Social Security.
” Today , Bloomberg wants to “ put the system on sound financial footing.
” In 2010 , Simpson and Bowles proclaimed that their goal was to “ ensure Social Security ’ s soundness.
” Instead , Bloomberg uses language similar to a 2010 proposal from Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles , the chairs of a deficit reduction commission set up by President Barack Obama .
Bloomberg vociferously supported the commission at the time .
By contrast , Bloomberg ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ campaign did not respond when asked whether he is taking all benefit cuts off the table .
But the rest of Bloomberg ’ s plan must be read skeptically .
The campaigns of Sen. Bernie Sanders , I-Vt. , Sen. Elizabeth Warren , D-Mass.
, and former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg explicitly rule out any cuts to Social Security benefits .
While this may sound something like President George W. Bush ’ s 2005 proposal for privatizing Social Security , it ’ s significantly superior .
Under Bloomberg ’ s plan , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ government , allowing for super-low fees that would be collected by Washington .
Bush wanted the accounts to be run by Wall Street , which would have generated a gusher of high fees flowing to downtown Manhattan .
( At the time , a financial blogger wrote that a former co-worker at a huge investment bank told him , “ I want that dumb public money coming across my desk.
” ) Interestingly , Bloomberg also proposes that the U.S. create a new “ public-option retirement savings plan , with automatic employer and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a government-run 401 ( k ) plan for all workers who don ’ t have access to one through their jobs — including a matching government contribution akin to those provided by many employers .
The former New York City mayor ’ s plan does include some ideas that , from the perspective of America ’ s middle and working class , are a big improvement .
He calls for upping Social Security ’ s cost-of-living adjustments , because there appears to be a higher rate of inflation for the goods and services @ @ @ @ @ @ @ younger population .
He also advocates an increase in benefits for the poorest beneficiaries .
This is an unsettling thing to hear from a billionaire would-be president .
The idea that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme has obsessed the U.S. right since the program was founded in 1935 .
They believe that the fact that Social Security requires a continuing new supply of “ investors ” ( i.e.
, workers ) who just hand their money to previous investors ( i.e.
, retirees ) makes it inherently Ponzi-like .
At the end @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to secure enough votes from their own commission to fast-track it through Congress .
By February 2011 , Bloomberg was explaining to Time magazine that Social Security was essentially fraudulent .
“ Everybody just thought , Where did [ Bernie ] Madoff get the idea ?
” Bloomberg said .
“ A cynic would say Social Security , [ though ] I would never say that .
But it ’ s exactly the same thing , isn ’ t it ?
” But Bloomberg was still in office during Obama ’ s first @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from the near depression caused by the housing bubble .
The deficit spending necessary to prevent complete economic collapse filled billionaires and CEOs with anxiety , and they became obsessed with shrinking it as soon as possible .
After the extraordinary success of his Wall Street terminal business made him a billionaire , Bloomberg was elected mayor of New York in 2001 at age 59 .
This immediately gave him a place on the national political stage .
Bloomberg , then a registered Republican , spoke at the 2004 GOP convention in New @ @ @ @ @ @ @ credit , Bloomberg disavowed Bush ’ s plan to privatize Social Security the next year .
If you want to stop working in 30 years but still continue eating food , you don ’ t buy $ 1,000 worth of dried figs and store them in a cave to await your hungry arrival in 2050 .
But this is true of any kind of saving for retirement , Social Security or cash or shares in a mutual fund .
If you want to stop working in 30 years but still continue eating food @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 1,000 worth of dried figs and store them in a cave to await your hungry arrival in 2050 .
Instead , you hand your $ 1,000 over to someone today in order to establish a claim on food produced in 2050 .
If there are no young workers available to make food for you in 2050 , your whole “ saving for retirement ” scheme will indeed experience a Ponzi-like collapse .
But that ’ s true whether it ’ s Social Security or anything else .
The only difference between a Ponzi @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is the promised rate of return on your investment .
What rate of return is plausible depends on how many young workers there are to support you and how productive they are .
Here again Bloomberg is flummoxed by the basic facts of Social Security .
In May 2011 , he went on “ Meet the Press.
” “ What the Democrats have to understand , ” Bloomberg said , “ is you ’ re never going to balance the budget unless you make meaningful changes in entitlements .
We used to have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it ’ s three people or something like that supporting every retiree .
… You have to have some combination of cuts in expenses and some revenue enhancements.
” This indeed sounds bad , until you think about it for one second .
According to Social Security ’ s official numbers , there were 41.9 workers for every beneficiary in 1945 .
By 1950 , there were 16.5 , then 3.7 in 1970 , and 2.9 when Bloomberg was speaking in 2011 .
In other words , the number of workers per retiree @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was fretting about it on TV .
Yet Social Security checks were still going out like clockwork .
The whole system kept working because workers in 2011 were much , much more productive than in 1945 .
Consider that 150 years ago , 50 percent of all Americans worked on farms .
Today , only 2 percent do .
Yet overall , the rest of America does not suffer from a lack of food .
Similarly , we ’ ve done fine going from the 1945 Social Security ratio to 2011 ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 2.7 .
It ’ s projected to decline further , to 2.1 , by the end of the 21st century .
But given our prior experience , there ’ s no reason to fear that 2095 ’ s workers won ’ t be able to support 2095 ’ s beneficiaries .
Yet Bloomberg kept on pushing , and kept on misunderstanding how Social Security works .
In November 2011 , he delivered a major address at the liberal Center for American Progress in Washington , D.C .
It included his previous shtick on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
“ I believe the time has come , ” Bloomberg declared , “ to embrace the spending cuts in Simpson-Bowles largely in their entirety , including their Social Security reforms.
” Specifically , he said , the U.S. needed to make “ modest adjustments to future benefits now , by slowly phasing in a higher retirement age over the next six decades ” and reducing Social Security ’ s cost-of-living adjustments ( i.e.
, the opposite of the increase in the cost-of-living adjustment that his campaign advocates today ) .
The numbers @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ In 1950 , there were 16 workers for every one retiree , which kept taxes reasonably low for each worker .
… Fifteen years from now , that number is expected to be only two workers per retiree .
… Americans will be spending more and more of each day working to support other people ’ s retirement , instead of supporting their own families if you do the math — 50-50 , 50 percent for other families , 50 percent for their own.
” This was wildly off-base .
The next @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Fix the Debt , a project of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget .
CRFB has an online calculator that allows anyone to fiddle around with different ways of making Social Security solvent .
Again , today ’ s payroll tax rate is 12.4 percent .
As the calculator shows , raising it to 15 or 16 percent — that is , nowhere near 50 percent — would cover all promised benefits until the dawn of the 22nd century .
The official 2019 Social Security report projects that an increase of 2.78 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Meanwhile , thanks to productivity increases , workers paying a higher Social Security tax rate in the future would still be taking home after-tax wages much higher than workers today — just as workers now have a higher after-tax income than workers in 1960 , even though the Social Security tax then was half what it is today .
Throughout 2012 , Bloomberg continued to play the same dirge .
On March 28 , he wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that emphasized the importance of “ slowing the growth of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ next day , he appeared on CBS to make the case that America needed to “ decrease the benefits or raise the eligibility age for Medicare and for Social Security.
” Later that year , he contributed a piece to the Washington Post .
He was encouraged , he said , that the Obama administration and Congress were talking about tax increases and cuts to Social Security and Medicare — even if “ the tax revenue and entitlement cuts being discussed are both less than what I and many others believe are necessary.
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ the “ Charlie Rose ” show with Bill Gates , one of the handful of people on Earth richer than him .
Bloomberg again said it was necessary to “ raise the age where these programs [ Social Security and Medicare ] kick in ” and nattered on about the worker-to-retiree ratio .
Then he added one last burst of confusion : “ But when they say the Social Security trust fund , there is no Social Security trust fund .
The government takes this money and just throws it into the pile @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on their favorite programs .
… [ Benefits ] will have to come out of current revenue because we haven ’ t remotely put aside enough money to fund it.
” The Social Security trust fund is a strange , perplexing concept , and there are two legitimate ways of looking at it .
What you shouldn ’ t do is talk about it in both ways simultaneously , which is what Bloomberg did .
The first , simplest way is to consider the federal government as one unified entity .
The last @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the 1980s .
Payroll taxes were raised to a level greater than needed to pay benefits at the time .
The extra money was used to buy government bonds , which now belonged to the Social Security trust funds , currently with reserves of $ 2.8 trillion .
But if the federal government is one entity , these bonds were not real assets , in the same way that you haven ’ t increased your wealth if one of your pockets borrows $ 5 from another .
In that sense , as Bloomberg @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Security trust fund.
” From this first perspective , however , there ’ s no way for any part of the government to “ save ” for the future in the way individuals can , or go broke .
It therefore made no sense for Bloomberg to get angry that benefits would “ have to come out of current revenue because we haven ’ t remotely put aside enough money to fund it.
” Here he switched to the second perspective on the Social Security trust fund , that it is separate from @ @ @ @ @ @ @ save for the future and “ put aside money.
” If so , there are Social Security trust funds .
The whole thing is a morass of miscomprehension on Bloomberg ’ s part .
In any case , by the middle of Obama ’ s second term , the momentum for cutting entitlements was waning .
The 2016 Democratic Party platform affirmatively called for expansion of Social Security and no cuts .
Bloomberg ’ s billions make him essentially his own party , however .
And despite his glaring lack of understanding of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to reduce benefits appears quite genuine .
His plan seems carefully designed to give him wiggle room to do so .
So voters may be wise not to take his current effusiveness for the program at face value .

A review of Michael Bloomberg’s many statements on Social Security over the last 10 years makes two things clear.
First, Bloomberg deeply and sincerely believes that the well-being of the United States requires cuts to Social Security benefits.
Second, Bloomberg has no idea how Social Security works. Instead, his head is filled with a hodgepodge of right-wing talking points about the program.
On Sunday, Bloomberg’s presidential campaign released his official proposal for Social Security and retirement more generally. It’s written to give the impression that if elected, Bloomberg would not cut Social Security for anyone, and in fact, would expand benefits for everyone. However, the plan leaves the door open to benefit cuts for some beneficiaries — just as Bloomberg has advocated for years.
The former New York City mayor’s plan does include some ideas that, from the perspective of America’s middle and working class, are a big improvement. He calls for upping Social Security’s cost-of-living adjustments, because there appears to be a higher rate of inflation for the goods and services needed by the elderly than by the younger population. He also advocates an increase in benefits for the poorest beneficiaries.
Interestingly, Bloomberg also proposes that the U.S. create a new “public-option retirement savings plan, with automatic employer and employee contributions.” This would essentially be a government-run 401(k) plan for all workers who don’t have access to one through their jobs — including a matching government contribution akin to those provided by many employers.
While this may sound something like President George W. Bush’s 2005 proposal for privatizing Social Security, it’s significantly superior. Under Bloomberg’s plan, the accounts would be run by the government, allowing for super-low fees that would be collected by Washington. Bush wanted the accounts to be run by Wall Street, which would have generated a gusher of high fees flowing to downtown Manhattan. (At the time, a financial blogger wrote that a former co-worker at a huge investment bank told him, “I want that dumb public money coming across my desk.”)
But the rest of Bloomberg’s plan must be read skeptically. The campaigns of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg explicitly rule out any cuts to Social Security benefits.
By contrast, Bloomberg’s proposal does not. Bloomberg’s campaign did not respond when asked whether he is taking all benefit cuts off the table.
Instead, Bloomberg uses language similar to a 2010 proposal from Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, the chairs of a deficit reduction commission set up by President Barack Obama. Bloomberg vociferously supported the commission at the time.
According to Bloomberg’s proposal, “Mike will strengthen entitlement programs.” Simpson and Bowles said their mixture of minor benefit increases and significant cuts would “strengthen Social Security.” Today, Bloomberg wants to “put the system on sound financial footing.” In 2010, Simpson and Bowles proclaimed that their goal was to “ensure Social Security’s soundness.”
Like Bloomberg today, Simpson and Bowles proposed increasing Social Security benefits for the poorest beneficiaries. Unlike Bloomberg, they explicitly advocated cuts that would have reduced the benefits of those further up the income ladder. This would have reduced overall costs and made the program more like traditional welfare — an outcome that would have weakened political support for Social Security and made it vulnerable to further cuts in the future.
The lack of a straightforward disavowal of cuts from the Bloomberg campaign, combined with Bloomberg’s history, suggests that his plan shares significant genetics with Simpson-Bowles.
Unsettling Comparisons
Social Security is one of the simplest and most efficient programs ever created by the U.S. government. Essentially, it deducts money from the paychecks of today’s workers and sends it to retirees (plus some widows, orphans, and people with disabilities), providing them with a modest but completely secure income. The current contribution rate is 12.4 percent of everyone’s salary up to $137,700.
After decades of propaganda by the corporate right, Americans have become convinced that Social Security faces a terrifying day of reckoning. It does not. It does need some minor adjustments, but that’s something that’s happened many times before and is unremarkable in the context of a program that is 85 years past its initial enactment.
The central issue is straightforward. The Social Security Administration projects that, mostly thanks to the retirement of the baby boomers, the cost of the program will increase from 4.9 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product in 2019 to about 5.9 percent by 2039. Then it will stay there indefinitely. In other words, if we can figure out some way to send one additional dollar out of every hundred in the American economy to retirees, there’s no need to cut benefits.
This is where Bloomberg comes in. Like many at the top of the U.S. pyramid, Bloomberg is transfixed by the idea that the U.S. and its citizens are wildly profligate and that unless we sober up, the country will someday be punished for our wantonness.
Photo: Beth A. Keiser/AP
After the extraordinary success of his Wall Street terminal business made him a billionaire, Bloomberg was elected mayor of New York in 2001 at age 59. This immediately gave him a place on the national political stage. Bloomberg, then a registered Republican, spoke at the 2004 GOP convention in New York and endorsed Bush. To his credit, Bloomberg disavowed Bush’s plan to privatize Social Security the next year.
But Bloomberg was still in office during Obama’s first term as the U.S. tried to recover from the near depression caused by the housing bubble. The deficit spending necessary to prevent complete economic collapse filled billionaires and CEOs with anxiety, and they became obsessed with shrinking it as soon as possible.
At the end of 2010, the Simpson-Bowles plan failed to secure enough votes from their own commission to fast-track it through Congress. By February 2011, Bloomberg was explaining to Time magazine that Social Security was essentially fraudulent. “Everybody just thought, Where did [Bernie] Madoff get the idea?” Bloomberg said. “A cynic would say Social Security, [though] I would never say that. But it’s exactly the same thing, isn’t it?”
This is an unsettling thing to hear from a billionaire would-be president. The idea that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme has obsessed the U.S. right since the program was founded in 1935. They believe that the fact that Social Security requires a continuing new supply of “investors” (i.e., workers) who just hand their money to previous investors (i.e., retirees) makes it inherently Ponzi-like.
If you want to stop working in 30 years but still continue eating food, you don’t buy $1,000 worth of dried figs and store them in a cave to await your hungry arrival in 2050.
But this is true of any kind of saving for retirement, Social Security or cash or shares in a mutual fund. If you want to stop working in 30 years but still continue eating food, you don’t buy $1,000 worth of dried figs and store them in a cave to await your hungry arrival in 2050. Instead, you hand your $1,000 over to someone today in order to establish a claim on food produced in 2050.
If there are no young workers available to make food for you in 2050, your whole “saving for retirement” scheme will indeed experience a Ponzi-like collapse. But that’s true whether it’s Social Security or anything else. The only difference between a Ponzi scheme and sober, rational retirement planning is the promised rate of return on your investment.
What rate of return is plausible depends on how many young workers there are to support you and how productive they are. Here again Bloomberg is flummoxed by the basic facts of Social Security.
In May 2011, he went on “Meet the Press.” “What the Democrats have to understand,” Bloomberg said, “is you’re never going to balance the budget unless you make meaningful changes in entitlements. We used to have 30-odd people supporting every retiree, today it’s three people or something like that supporting every retiree. … You have to have some combination of cuts in expenses and some revenue enhancements.”
This indeed sounds bad, until you think about it for one second. According to Social Security’s official numbers, there were 41.9 workers for every beneficiary in 1945. By 1950, there were 16.5, then 3.7 in 1970, and 2.9 when Bloomberg was speaking in 2011.
In other words, the number of workers per retiree had already declined by the time Bloomberg was fretting about it on TV. Yet Social Security checks were still going out like clockwork. The whole system kept working because workers in 2011 were much, much more productive than in 1945. Consider that 150 years ago, 50 percent of all Americans worked on farms. Today, only 2 percent do. Yet overall, the rest of America does not suffer from a lack of food.
Similarly, we’ve done fine going from the 1945 Social Security ratio to 2011’s to today’s, which is 2.7. It’s projected to decline further, to 2.1, by the end of the 21st century. But given our prior experience, there’s no reason to fear that 2095’s workers won’t be able to support 2095’s beneficiaries.
A Morass of Miscomprehension
Yet Bloomberg kept on pushing, and kept on misunderstanding how Social Security works. In November 2011, he delivered a major address at the liberal Center for American Progress in Washington, D.C. It included his previous shtick on Social Security with something new tacked on.
“I believe the time has come,” Bloomberg declared, “to embrace the spending cuts in Simpson-Bowles largely in their entirety, including their Social Security reforms.” Specifically, he said, the U.S. needed to make “modest adjustments to future benefits now, by slowly phasing in a higher retirement age over the next six decades” and reducing Social Security’s cost-of-living adjustments (i.e., the opposite of the increase in the cost-of-living adjustment that his campaign advocates today).
The numbers made this clear, he explained. “In 1950, there were 16 workers for every one retiree, which kept taxes reasonably low for each worker. … Fifteen years from now, that number is expected to be only two workers per retiree. … Americans will be spending more and more of each day working to support other people’s retirement, instead of supporting their own families if you do the math — 50-50, 50 percent for other families, 50 percent for their own.”
This was wildly off-base. The next year, Bloomberg would become co-chair of Fix the Debt, a project of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. CRFB has an online calculator that allows anyone to fiddle around with different ways of making Social Security solvent. Again, today’s payroll tax rate is 12.4 percent. As the calculator shows, raising it to 15 or 16 percent — that is, nowhere near 50 percent — would cover all promised benefits until the dawn of the 22nd century. The official 2019 Social Security report projects that an increase of 2.78 percent is all that is needed.
Meanwhile, thanks to productivity increases, workers paying a higher Social Security tax rate in the future would still be taking home after-tax wages much higher than workers today — just as workers now have a higher after-tax income than workers in 1960, even though the Social Security tax then was half what it is today.
Throughout 2012, Bloomberg continued to play the same dirge. On March 28, he wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that emphasized the importance of “slowing the growth of entitlement costs including Social Security.” The next day, he appeared on CBS to make the case that America needed to “decrease the benefits or raise the eligibility age for Medicare and for Social Security.”
Later that year, he contributed a piece to the Washington Post. He was encouraged, he said, that the Obama administration and Congress were talking about tax increases and cuts to Social Security and Medicare — even if “the tax revenue and entitlement cuts being discussed are both less than what I and many others believe are necessary.”
In early 2013 Bloomberg went on the “Charlie Rose” show with Bill Gates, one of the handful of people on Earth richer than him. Bloomberg again said it was necessary to “raise the age where these programs [Social Security and Medicare] kick in” and nattered on about the worker-to-retiree ratio.
Then he added one last burst of confusion: “But when they say the Social Security trust fund, there is no Social Security trust fund. The government takes this money and just throws it into the pile with everything else and they spend it on their favorite programs. … [Benefits] will have to come out of current revenue because we haven’t remotely put aside enough money to fund it.”
The Social Security trust fund is a strange, perplexing concept, and there are two legitimate ways of looking at it. What you shouldn’t do is talk about it in both ways simultaneously, which is what Bloomberg did.
The first, simplest way is to consider the federal government as one unified entity. The last time Social Security was overhauled was in the 1980s. Payroll taxes were raised to a level greater than needed to pay benefits at the time. The extra money was used to buy government bonds, which now belonged to the Social Security trust funds, currently with reserves of $2.8 trillion.
But if the federal government is one entity, these bonds were not real assets, in the same way that you haven’t increased your wealth if one of your pockets borrows $5 from another. In that sense, as Bloomberg said, “There is no Social Security trust fund.”
From this first perspective, however, there’s no way for any part of the government to “save” for the future in the way individuals can, or go broke. It therefore made no sense for Bloomberg to get angry that benefits would “have to come out of current revenue because we haven’t remotely put aside enough money to fund it.” Here he switched to the second perspective on the Social Security trust fund, that it is separate from the rest of the government and can save for the future and “put aside money.” If so, there are Social Security trust funds. The whole thing is a morass of miscomprehension on Bloomberg’s part.
In any case, by the middle of Obama’s second term, the momentum for cutting entitlements was waning. The 2016 Democratic Party platform affirmatively called for expansion of Social Security and no cuts.
Bloomberg’s billions make him essentially his own party, however. And despite his glaring lack of understanding of how Social Security works, his desire to reduce benefits appears quite genuine. His plan seems carefully designed to give him wiggle room to do so. So voters may be wise not to take his current effusiveness for the program at face value.


theintercept--2020-02-19--The Law Says Chelsea Manning Must Be Freed From Prison

Manning ’ s actions over the last months is to know that she will not be coerced .
She could have avoided her current incarceration at Alexandria Detention Center in Virginia , where she has been held for nearly a year .
She could have freed herself at any point .
She could have avoided accruing fines of $ 230,000 and counting .
She could still avoid further days in jail and further crippling debts to the government .
All she would have to do — all she ever had to do — is testify in front of the federal @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s actions over the last months is to know that she will not be coerced .
She could have avoided her current incarceration at Alexandria Detention Center in Virginia , where she has been held for nearly a year .
She could have freed herself at any point .
She could have avoided accruing fines of $ 230,000 and counting .
She could still avoid further days in jail and further crippling debts to the government .
All she would have to do — all she ever had to do — is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ jury currently investigating WikiLeaks .
What has long been clear — no amount of jail time will coerce Manning into speaking — is now , surely , undeniable .
The sole purpose of Manning ’ s detention has been to coerce her to testify , and it has failed .
On Wednesday , Manning ’ s legal team filed what ’ s known as a Grumbles motion in court , asserting that Manning has proven herself incoercible and so must , according to legal statute , be released from her incarceration .
It @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that a person who refuses to cooperate with a grand jury subpoena may be held in contempt of court and fined or imprisoned with the express purpose of coercing testimony , but when the coercive condition is absent , such incarceration becomes illegal .
Wednesday ’ s motion directs Judge Anthony Trenga , who is presiding over the grand jury and Manning ’ s imprisonment , to accordingly recognize the illegality in this case .
“ The key issue before Judge Trenga is whether continued incarceration could persuade Chelsea to testify , ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Meltzer-Cohen , on filing the Grumbles motion .
“ Judges have complained of the ‘ perversity ’ of this law : that a witness may win their freedom by persisting in their contempt of court .
However , should Judge Trenga agree that Chelsea will never agree to testify , he will be compelled by the law to order her release.
” If the motion is successful , Manning will be freed for the very reason she has been caged : her silence .
The judge can decide to recognize that Manning won @ @ @ @ @ @ @ more time in jail — or because she will continue to face unprecedented $ 1,000-per-day fines .
Any other conclusion , after her months of steadfast and principled grand jury resistance , would fly in the face of all reason .
The whistleblower ’ s actions and words make it plain .
“ I have been separated from my loved ones , deprived of sunlight , and could not even attend my mother ’ s funeral , ” Manning said in a statement Wednesday .
“ It is easier to endure these hardships @ @ @ @ @ @ @ some comfort , and live the rest of my life knowing that I acted out of self-interest and not principle.
” have long been used to investigate and intimidate activist communities — from the late 19th century labor movements , to the Puerto Rican Independence Movement and black liberationists of the last century , to the more recent persecutions of environmentalists , anarchists , and Indigenous rights fighters .
Manning has consistently shown her refusal to cooperate with any such process , and again asserted in her latest statement that grand juries are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and disrupt political opponents and activists through secrecy , coercion , and jailing without trial.
” filed on Wednesday contains a letter from the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer , written late last year accusing the United States of submitting Manning to treatment that is tantamount to torture .
As I wrote after the letter was first released , Melzer not only criticized the torturous practice of coercive imprisonment and harsh fines , but noted that Manning ’ s “ categorical and persistent refusal to give testimony demonstrates the lack @ @ @ @ @ @ @ also includes a personality assessment carried out by Dr. Sara Boyd , a clinical and forensic psychologist from the University of Virginia , which suggests that Manning is constitutionally incapable of acting against her conscience .
“ Manning exhibits long standing personality features that relate to her scrupulousness , her persistence and dedication , and her willingness to endure social disapproval as well as formal punishments , ” Boyd wrote .
Manning ’ s consistent behavior in the face of immense hardship and financial ruin should be wholly sufficient evidence that she will @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and the letter from the U.N. rapporteur no more than state the obvious .
Were the judge to decide to continue imprisoning Manning , which he has the discretion to do , he would do so in the face of overwhelming evidence .
Meltzer-Cohen , Manning ’ s attorney , has in the past successfully seen a grand jury resister released as a consequence of her filing a Grumbles motion .
In 2014 , her former client , a New York-based anarchist , was released after spending 241 days in a federal prison @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a motion arguing that since the young man had made amply evident that he would never cooperate , the coercive premise of his imprisonment was proven invalid .
That motion was aided by letters from friends and acquaintances , as well as a Change.org petition — arguably less august testimony than that which accompanies Manning ’ s motion .
But the judge in that case ruled , begrudgingly , that the evidence compelled him to release the prisoner .
“ The refusal to testify is somehow transmogrified from a lock to a key @ @ @ @ @ @ @ decision .
At the time , Meltzer-Cohen told me that the case illustrated the power of grand jury resistance ; that people “ have been capable of standing strong in the face of serious consequences ” and that resisters “ can survive and even prevail.
” It is a perverse juridical logic that finds potential justice in brutally coercing a witness to testify before a secretive hearing , ripe for governmental abuse .
But even the nefarious law , if followed to the letter , demands that Manning be immediately freed .

Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images
To observe Chelsea
Manning’s actions over the last months is to know that she will not be coerced. She could have avoided her current incarceration at Alexandria Detention Center in Virginia, where she has been held for nearly a year. She could have freed herself at any point. She could have avoided accruing fines of $230,000 and counting. She could still avoid further days in jail and further crippling debts to the government. All she would have to do — all she ever had to do — is testify in front of the federal grand jury currently investigating WikiLeaks.
What has long been clear — no amount of jail time will coerce Manning into speaking — is now, surely, undeniable. The sole purpose of Manning’s detention has been to coerce her to testify, and it has failed.
On Wednesday, Manning’s legal team filed what’s known as a Grumbles motion in court, asserting that Manning has proven herself incoercible and so must, according to legal statute, be released from her incarceration.
“Should Judge Trenga agree that Chelsea will never agree to testify, he will be compelled by the law to order her release.”
It is a grim peculiarity of American law that a person who refuses to cooperate with a grand jury subpoena may be held in contempt of court and fined or imprisoned with the express purpose of coercing testimony, but when the coercive condition is absent, such incarceration becomes illegal. Wednesday’s motion directs Judge Anthony Trenga, who is presiding over the grand jury and Manning’s imprisonment, to accordingly recognize the illegality in this case.
“The key issue before Judge Trenga is whether continued incarceration could persuade Chelsea to testify,” said Manning’s attorney, Moira Meltzer-Cohen, on filing the Grumbles motion. “Judges have complained of the ‘perversity’ of this law: that a witness may win their freedom by persisting in their contempt of court. However, should Judge Trenga agree that Chelsea will never agree to testify, he will be compelled by the law to order her release.”
If the motion is successful, Manning will be freed for the very reason she has been caged: her silence. The judge can decide to recognize that Manning won’t speak as a consequence of more time in jail — or because she will continue to face unprecedented $1,000-per-day fines. Any other conclusion, after her months of steadfast and principled grand jury resistance, would fly in the face of all reason. The whistleblower’s actions and words make it plain.
“I have been separated from my loved ones, deprived of sunlight, and could not even attend my mother’s funeral,” Manning said in a statement Wednesday. “It is easier to endure these hardships now than to cooperate to win back some comfort, and live the rest of my life knowing that I acted out of self-interest and not principle.”
Federal grand juries have long been used to investigate and intimidate activist communities — from the late 19th century labor movements, to the Puerto Rican Independence Movement and black liberationists of the last century, to the more recent persecutions of environmentalists, anarchists, and Indigenous rights fighters. Manning has consistently shown her refusal to cooperate with any such process, and again asserted in her latest statement that grand juries are “used by federal prosecutors to harass and disrupt political opponents and activists through secrecy, coercion, and jailing without trial.”
The Grumbles motion filed on Wednesday contains a letter from the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer, written late last year accusing the United States of submitting Manning to treatment that is tantamount to torture. As I wrote after the letter was first released, Melzer not only criticized the torturous practice of coercive imprisonment and harsh fines, but noted that Manning’s “categorical and persistent refusal to give testimony demonstrates the lack of their coercive effect.”
The motion also includes a personality assessment carried out by Dr. Sara Boyd, a clinical and forensic psychologist from the University of Virginia, which suggests that Manning is constitutionally incapable of acting against her conscience. “Manning exhibits long standing personality features that relate to her scrupulousness, her persistence and dedication, and her willingness to endure social disapproval as well as formal punishments,” Boyd wrote.
Manning’s consistent behavior in the face of immense hardship and financial ruin should be wholly sufficient evidence that she will not be coerced; the personality assessment and the letter from the U.N. rapporteur no more than state the obvious. Were the judge to decide to continue imprisoning Manning, which he has the discretion to do, he would do so in the face of overwhelming evidence.
Meltzer-Cohen, Manning’s attorney, has in the past successfully seen a grand jury resister released as a consequence of her filing a Grumbles motion. In 2014, her former client, a New York-based anarchist, was released after spending 241 days in a federal prison for refusing to testify. Meltzer-Cohen filed a motion arguing that since the young man had made amply evident that he would never cooperate, the coercive premise of his imprisonment was proven invalid.
That motion was aided by letters from friends and acquaintances, as well as a Change.org petition — arguably less august testimony than that which accompanies Manning’s motion. But the judge in that case ruled, begrudgingly, that the evidence compelled him to release the prisoner. “The refusal to testify is somehow transmogrified from a lock to a key,” the judge wrote in his decision. At the time, Meltzer-Cohen told me that the case illustrated the power of grand jury resistance; that people “have been capable of standing strong in the face of serious consequences” and that resisters “can survive and even prevail.”
It is a perverse juridical logic that finds potential justice in brutally coercing a witness to testify before a secretive hearing, ripe for governmental abuse. But even the nefarious law, if followed to the letter, demands that Manning be immediately freed.


theintercept--2020-02-18--Here’s Mike Bloomberg’s Leaked Higher Education Plan

The plan also includes an apprenticeship proposal that is geared to the private industry , which is likely to anger union leaders .
The plan also goes backward in some places and would also slash the benefits borrowers receive under an income-driven student loan repayment program , capping the amount that can be forgiven after 20 years for people in income-driven repayment plans .
Currently , there is no cap .
Billionaire Mike Bloomberg ’ s presidential campaign is planning to release a higher education plan on Tuesday that pledges to make community college free , increase subsidies for low-income @ @ @ @ @ @ @ legacy admissions — but falls far short of what much of the Democratic pack has so far laid out on the campaign trail .
The Bloomberg plan is scheduled for public release at 9 a.m. on Tuesday but was leaked to a rival campaign by multiple Bloomberg staffers , which then provided it to The Intercept .
( Bloomberg may be able to hire thousands of party operatives , but he apparently can ’ t buy all of their loyalty . )
The Bloomberg forgiveness provision , instead of wiping out all remaining @ @ @ @ @ @ @ income-driven repayments , as is current law , would cap the amount that would qualify for forgiveness at $ 57,000 .
This would leave many borrowers in income-driven repayment plans with just as much debt or more than what they first started with .
Though his plan also reduces the monthly repayment amount to 5 percent of discretionary income , down from the current 10 percent , it ’ s still significantly less generous than current law to a significant portion of the estimated 8 million borrowers who rely on income-based repayment plans @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Out of the current Democratic primary field , only Sens .
Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are proposing to eliminate student loan debt , which currently burdens more than 44 million Americans .
Sanders ’ s universal plan goes the furthest on the issue , vowing to cancel every last dollar of student debt .
Warren ’ s means-tested plan , meanwhile , would offer no debt forgiveness for those making more than $ 250,000 a year and would cap the amount forgiven at $ 50,000 per person , regardless of income .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ by executive action , which wouldn ’ t require congressional approval .
Another plank of the oligarch ’ s higher education plan commits to tripling direct federal Title III funding to historically black colleges and universities , Hispanic-serving institutions , and other minority-serving institutions .
But that increase amounts to just $ 7.5 billion over 10 years , while former Vice President Joe Biden , for instance , has proposed $ 70 billion in that sort of funding , and Sanders has pushed for $ 50 billion .
Despite the promise of additional @ @ @ @ @ @ @ rankle HBCUs .
When the Obama administration made a similar proposal around free community college , HBCU leaders warned that the alternative would likely be taken by a substantial number of students who ’ d otherwise have gone to an HBCU , devastating enrollment .
Biden ’ s plan covers community college or provides full grants for two years at an HBCU or equivalent HSI .
The most Bloombergian element of the plan , however , involves the former mayor ’ s focus on pushing colleges and universities to meld their curriculum with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a close pairing of college with corporate training and internships .
As the plan lays out :

Billionaire Mike Bloomberg’s presidential campaign is planning to release a higher education plan on Tuesday that pledges to make community college free, increase subsidies for low-income students, and end the practice of legacy admissions — but falls far short of what much of the Democratic pack has so far laid out on the campaign trail.
The plan also goes backward in some places and would also slash the benefits borrowers receive under an income-driven student loan repayment program, capping the amount that can be forgiven after 20 years for people in income-driven repayment plans. Currently, there is no cap.
The plan also includes an apprenticeship proposal that is geared to the private industry, which is likely to anger union leaders.
The Bloomberg plan is scheduled for public release at 9 a.m. on Tuesday but was leaked to a rival campaign by multiple Bloomberg staffers, which then provided it to The Intercept. (Bloomberg may be able to hire thousands of party operatives, but he apparently can’t buy all of their loyalty.)
The Bloomberg forgiveness provision, instead of wiping out all remaining federal student loans after 20 years of income-driven repayments, as is current law, would cap the amount that would qualify for forgiveness at $57,000. This would leave many borrowers in income-driven repayment plans with just as much debt or more than what they first started with. Though his plan also reduces the monthly repayment amount to 5 percent of discretionary income, down from the current 10 percent, it’s still significantly less generous than current law to a significant portion of the estimated 8 million borrowers who rely on income-based repayment plans to pay off their student loans.
Out of the current Democratic primary field, only Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are proposing to eliminate student loan debt, which currently burdens more than 44 million Americans. Sanders’s universal plan goes the furthest on the issue, vowing to cancel every last dollar of student debt. Warren’s means-tested plan, meanwhile, would offer no debt forgiveness for those making more than $250,000 a year and would cap the amount forgiven at $50,000 per person, regardless of income. Warren has pledged to implement her plan by executive action, which wouldn’t require congressional approval.
Another plank of the oligarch’s higher education plan commits to tripling direct federal Title III funding to historically black colleges and universities, Hispanic-serving institutions, and other minority-serving institutions. But that increase amounts to just $7.5 billion over 10 years, while former Vice President Joe Biden, for instance, has proposed $70 billion in that sort of funding, and Sanders has pushed for $50 billion.
Despite the promise of additional funds, Bloomberg’s plan may rankle HBCUs. When the Obama administration made a similar proposal around free community college, HBCU leaders warned that the alternative would likely be taken by a substantial number of students who’d otherwise have gone to an HBCU, devastating enrollment. Biden’s plan covers community college or provides full grants for two years at an HBCU or equivalent HSI.
The most Bloombergian element of the plan, however, involves the former mayor’s focus on pushing colleges and universities to meld their curriculum with various industries’ workforce needs and envisions a close pairing of college with corporate training and internships. As the plan lays out: