But let’s be clear about one thing Billionaires are egomaniacs. Their belief that not only are they the best qualified to run the country but that everyone else believes they are, too, will always trump what is best for the collective United States.Einenkel included several reactions. A sweet one is from candidate Elizabeth Warren. She welcomed him to the race and added:
If you're looking for policy plans that will make a huge difference for working people and which are very popular, start here:She provides a link to her website and its calculator so a billionaire could compute they would pay under her Ultra-Millionaire Tax.
Fidder tweeted:
Can’t just ONE rich dude try being Batman instead?
Josh Jordan added:
Bloomberg could just give me 5% of the cash he will burn in this embarrassing episode and I'd be set for life.
Clara Jeffrey responded:
Can billionaires stop running for office and trying to go to Mars and do something actually useful with their money until we can get proper tax reform, thanks.
Bloomberg could be an international hero by throwing all his money at climate change and/or gun reform. These are good things. More of that, please.
And, of course, the nasty guy base was unimpressed.
Man In The Hoody tweeted:
everyone: if we taxed billionaires just a little bit more everyone could get good healthcareMalkym Lesdrae offers a correction:
billionaires: or how about instead u make me president and everything stays the same?
Bllnaire: how about instead u make me president and we let everything keep getting worse for you and better for me?
Toro Blanco of the Daily Kos Community wrote about billionaires, though not directly in response to Bloomberg’s announcement. At the top of his post he has a graphic that compares the size of a million dollars with the size of a billion.
I’ve written before about how the rich keep money out of the hands of the poor. In that post from last January Melissa McEwan wrote this as Howard Schulz, another billionaire, contemplated being a candidate for president:
Anyone who is a billionaire is de facto completely out of touch with the lives of the majority of the population. They have no comprehension about what life is really like. One cannot effectively and decently lead people whose lives they fundamentally don't understand.… and …
And, truly, no president of a wildly and wonderfully diverse nation can know and understand the lives, needs, interests, struggles, and successes of everyone in the country. But living in a separate, elite economic stratosphere is insulating, even for the empathic and curious.
"Billionaire" isn't a qualification. It's the description of a person who is hoarding more resources than they could use in 100 lifetimes while other people are starving. It's the name for a human dragon sleeping on its pile of rubies and gold.
Blanco sidesteps that issue to present another: No one should be a billionaire. Nobody has “earned” a billion dollars. “Nobody, no matter how brilliant, creative, innovative, or essential to life as we know it, DESERVES to be a billionaire.”
Blanco adds a thought experiment. Suppose he created a wonder drug that cures all diseases and extends life. A thankful world gives him a stipend of a million dollars a month, or $12,000,000 a year. If anyone deserves such riches it would be the inventor of the miracle cure.
I’m a humble man, so after about a year I’m completely out of things to buy: my whole family have homes, paid in full; we all have our dream cars, money in the bank, set for life; college funds for children and grandchildren, and so on. After just a couple years the money is piling up, the tiny pittance I spend even on food and clothes a drop in the bucket compared to what floods in every month.But even with income that large it takes 83 years to get to a billion. And 4370 years to match Bloomberg, another 1513 years to catch up to Mark Zuckerberg, and a total of 9250 years to catch up to Jeff Bezos.
I add that someone would say that billionaires can take on big projects, such as going to Mars, that the government can’t do. But the government *can* do things like that – and has (we went to the moon). The advantage of the government doing it is that it has a much greater chance of benefiting the little guy, rather than other billionaires.
Elizabeth Warren is campaigning for the rich to pay their fair share and is ready for the fight. But several others, particularly establishment Democrats like Biden, are silent on the matter. Adam Jentleson tweets why:
The American people are super pissed at corporations and the rich. They are the cause of many huge problems and people know it. All we have to do is name the bad guys. But Democrats keep denying themselves this extremely compelling political narrative because we want their money.John Drake tweeted a solution: Federally funded campaigns.
One can tell Warren is hitting her target. Laura Clawson of Daily Kos says Wall Street is terrified of the thought of Warren becoming president. Never mind that her policies would have to go through a Congress that they’ve funded. So the finance industry sees two choices which they’ve been funding: One is the expected nasty guy. The other is Pete Buttigieg. And Wall Street thinking he is an acceptable candidate is enough for me to think he is unacceptable candidate. That only confirms the opinion I already had of him.
Robert Reich, former Labor Secretary, wrote about The Real Divide, an excerpt here:
In the conventional view of American politics, Joe Biden is a moderate while Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are on the left and Donald Trump is on the right.I’ll rephrase that a bit: Today’s great divide is not between left and right. It’s between the oppressed and supremacists.
This conventional view is rubbish. Today’s great divide is not between left and right. It’s between democracy and oligarchy.
There are no longer “moderates.” There’s no longer a “center.” The most powerful force in American politics today is anti-establishment fury at a rigged system.
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