FiveThirtyEight: Bloomberg Lost, But He May Still Get What He Wanted

But I don’t think Bloomberg’s candidacy was a mistake or unwise. He’s worth more than $50 billion — so it’s not clear the $400 million he spent on television commercials or the other money he poured into his campaign matters much to him. He got to go on stage in the debates and attack Sanders and Warren. We don’t know if that boosted Biden, but it likely didn’t hurt him. With Biden now in a much stronger position than when Bloomberg entered the race, you could argue that Bloomberg provided what he and other more center-left figures wanted — to steer the race towards a more moderate nominee. The more extreme back-up plan — nominate Bloomberg — ended up not being needed. My guess is that Bloomberg would have preferred to be the candidate instead of Biden but knew that was a fairly unlikely outcome, since he is a one-time Republican who entered the race in late November. [...]

Now go back to his previous political role: pumping his billions into a variety of liberal causes. He hired people in numerous states for his presidential campaign, and his employees were reportedly told that they would have jobs through November. It’s not clear if Bloomberg will end up retaining these staffers for some kind of operation to boost Biden against Sanders and Warren in the primary, have his team start focusing now on the general election against Trump or simply wind down his apparatus. But I expect him to stay out of the primary and focus on Trump.

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TLDR New: Could Bloomberg Become the Nominee: Mike's Rise Explained

Michael Bloomberg has experienced an impressive rise in the polls in recent months, with him closing in on Biden. It's looking more and more like he could be the serious moderate competition for Sanders. So in this video, we explain Bloomberg's history, his late entry into the race, why he's popular and why he isn't.

TLDR News: Bernie Wins Nevada: What That Means for the 2020 Race

At the weekend Senator Bernie Sanders won his third Primary of the 2020 process in Nevada. In this video, we discuss the winners and losers in Nevada as well as the impact this will have on the rest of the contest.

Politico: Bernie crashes the gates, Buttigieg cuts the line

The winner in New Hampshire, Senator Bernie Sanders, is, like the man he wants to overthrow, U.S. President Donald Trump, a gate-crasher who knows the only way he will be accepted by establishment power in the party or elsewhere in American life is not by persuasion or reassurance but by beating them head-on with the votes of people who share his grievances.

The runner-up, former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, is a line-cutter just like the last Democratic president, Barack Obama — perfectly comfortable with establishment power, just not willing to wait his turn and indifferent to those who say he’s promising but needs more experience. [...]

The former New York mayor’s unorthodox strategy, skipping the early states and blasting his way into the race with hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising, gives him elements of both line-cutter and gate-crasher. At a minimum, his $50-billion-plus fortune, combined with zero restraint about spending it, allows him to not care much about whatever old rules he is bending or breaking.

This leaves Klobuchar — newly ascendant just as Sen. Elizabeth Warren and former vice president Joe Biden are losing altitude with two weak performances in a row — as the only conventional candidate to emerge from New Hampshire with enhanced momentum. Neither gate-crasher nor line-cutter, she is the student who didn’t necessarily dazzle with charisma but turned her homework in on time and asked the teacher if she could have some more for extra credit.

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Slate: Pay to Play

I wrote my first “Bloomberg for President?” article in 2007. Bloomberg thought about it when he won his second term in 2005 as mayor. And then he left the Republican Party in 2007 and registered as an independent. That was part of a plan to run in 2008. He had staff that started to go around the country and explore ballot access questions and put together the pieces of what would have been a run then. Obviously it never happened, but it got reasonably far down the line. There was some talk about running maybe in 2012, but nothing more than a couple of conversations. [...]

The strategy now in 2020 is to skip the early states, which have traditionally been the places you go to sort of win over the field and burnish your reputation. Bloomberg really wants to make a big splash on Super Tuesday, and then it sounds like he wants to kind of go in and work all the advantages to get all the delegates he needs. It doesn’t sound particularly democratic. [...]

Bloomberg often gets a lot of attention for how much money he spent on campaigns. He spent more than that when he was mayor, between the races: funding, writing checks, inviting people to come play golf and stay at his home in Bermuda, flying on his private plane, advertising campaigns, the smoking ban, some of the education changes that he got. He was using the money as a way of bulldozing the opposition, of giving a support structure that people needed and wanted to be there in order to get what he wanted through, and make it so that he had an agenda that was able to progress. He also used it to drown out the opposition. That is something that’s very, very special for a mayor to be able to pull off, and only he has been able to do that. Imagine that you can pay for your opposition to just be quiet. Then suddenly you don’t seem like you’re unpopular, even in places where you might be. [...]

Bloomberg is about the money here. There’s no question about it. The money is an enormous part of that. And it’s a really odd fit for the Democratic Party at this point. I think his campaign would not even be within the realm of possibility if there weren’t such a level of anxiety among Democrats about beating Trump. It keeps coming back to the money for a lot of people, and that makes many other Democrats very uncomfortable. I was at an event in Iowa City a couple of days before the caucuses with Elizabeth Warren, and she called Bloomberg a danger to our democracy with the way that he is running the campaign, spending this much and skipping the early states. Not him, but the campaign was a danger to our democracy. That’s the way she said it.

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UnHerd: It’s time to tax the super rich

When asked how she intended to fund her Green New Deal, she noted that tax wouldn’t be such a crazy idea; the top marginal tax rate for much of America’s history had been around the 60-70% mark and perhaps the “tippy-top” earners on “$10,000,000 or more” ought to pay that much again. Income inequality in the US now exceeds what it was in the 1920s; only the top 1% have seen any real wage growth in the last 30 years, and it’s among the 0.1% that the increase is most pronounced. If you are in that micro-percentile, you can expect to earn 198 times what someone in the bottom 10% earns.

Not to be outdone, Elizabeth Warren, the presidential candidate and Democratic senator from Massachusetts, proposed a wealth tax on “ultra-millionaires” – 2% on accumulated wealth greater than $50,000,000, and 3% on wealth greater than $1,000,000,000. (I find writing out the actual numbers much more expressive than the near-euphemistic “million” and “billion”; more comparable to what each of us see when we check our online bank accounts). [...]

Ever since, the trend has been for top rate of income tax to fall – and for inequality to widen. When Margaret Thatcher came to power, she dropped the top rate from 83% to 60%. It fell further to 40% under Labour, went back up to 50% after the crash, before George Osborne cut it back from 50% to 45% (with no concomitant easing of his austerity agenda). Osborne later boasted that the measure had recouped £8 billion – apparently because so many top-earners had decided to keep their money in the country. Closer analysis suggest this was more likely the result of clever accounting on the part of the rich (deferring payment from one year to the next) and the actual effect was minimal.[...]

But it’s also true that setting your tax rate low can be utterly disastrous. The infamous Kansas Experiment saw Republican governor Sam Brownback eliminate state income tax and slash taxes for the highest earners in an attempt to boost investment. It resulted in a complete collapse in state revenues, school closures, prison riots, and subsequent shamefaced capitulation. It turns out that sometimes, asking people for less money means that you receive less money.

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The Atlantic: Democrats Are Newly Emboldened on Gun Control

In July 2001, at a meeting in Indianapolis, national Democratic chairman Terry McAuliffe told party brethren that gun control was an issue they were wise to avoid. Nobody in the ballroom challenged him. The consensus at the time was that Democrats had lost the House seven years earlier, when Newt Gingrich’s GOP picked up 54 seats, because President Bill Clinton had signed a ban on the sale of assault weapons. And in 2001, many Democrats believed that Al Gore had lost the recent presidential race because southern white males had tagged him as a gun controller.[...]

Largely overlooked during the government stasis in Washington is the news that House Democrats celebrated their return to power by touting legislation to expand background checks that would cover most firearm purchases—even those made at gun shows and online. The chief sponsor, Representative Mike Thompson of California, was once a recipient of NRA money and a B+ rating from the NRA. But now he’s hailing the gun-reform bill as “a decisive step to help save lives,” with strong support “from public polling to the ballot box.” [...]

The political winds have decisively shifted. According to the exit polls released last November, 59 percent of the voters in the congressional elections favored “stricter gun-control measures,” with only 37 percent in opposition. Of those who supported more gun control, 76 percent voted for House Democratic candidates. The NRA nevertheless insisted in a postelection statement that “gun control was not a decisive factor on election day,” but it appears that the ever-mounting national casualties—from Sandy Hook to Parkland to the Pittsburgh synagogue, with 116,000 shooting victims annually, 35,000 deaths annually, and historically high gun violence in schools—have undercut the NRA’s power and its purist defense of the Second Amendment. [...]

Granted, new House Democratic calls for an assault-weapons ban, stronger background checks, and a lifting of the 23-year ban on federal firearms research will likely die in the Republican Senate. But Democrats—buoyed by their historic gains in suburban House districts, particularly among independents and Republican-leaning women—believe that gun-reform policy is good politics, with the goal of rebuilding the party’s brand for 2020.

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