Patrick Semansky/AP Photo
Michael Bloomberg at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in January 2013
In an event at the Council on Foreign Relations in 2015, presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg likened the 38-million strong American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) to the National Rifle Association, criticizing the senior advocates for opposing increases to the Social Security retirement age. The comments match Bloomberg’s consistent record of favoring cuts to social insurance programs, at odds with the current stance on his campaign website.
The conversation between Bloomberg and CFR president Richard N. Haass was supposed to be about climate change. “Shouldn’t it be less difficult than it seems to be to build public support for this issue?” Haass asked. Bloomberg explained that the problem was translating support into political action. For example, he said, gun safety laws like background checks on gun-show and internet sales poll incredibly high but cannot get through Congress.
“Why? Because the gun advocates, the NRA is a single-issue advocacy group… they have a disproportionate percent of power,” said Bloomberg, who then quickly shifted gears. “So does the AARP. Somebody suggested we change the age when Social Security kicks in in the year 2050. They went crazy, it would hurt their members. How many members of the AARP are going to be around in 2050? Come on.” The comment received a smattering of laughter.
Speaking at the Economic Club of Chicago in August 2012, Bloomberg took similar aim, expressing his disappointment that “nobody’s going to stand up and say to the AARP, ‘we are going to really cut back your benefits.’” He held out hope for the one politician with the guts to stick it to the elderly and their allies: architect of social spending cuts Paul Ryan.
Retirement-age benefits aren’t given directly to the AARP, of course, but the seniors they represent. The organization’s constituency of millions resist social insurance cuts, not because of a raw grab at power, but because they need the benefits they earned over a lifetime in order to survive with dignity. The comparison is particularly foreboding, given that Bloomberg has remade his post-mayoral political reputation by taking on the NRA on gun control issues, via his Everytown for Gun Safety group. “Strengthening and protecting Social Security and Medicare is vital because hardworking Americans have paid into these programs and count on their earned benefits to live independently as they age,” said David Certner, AARP Legislative Counsel & Policy Director, in a statement to the Prospect. The organization, which is non-partisan, declined to comment on specific presidential candidates.
The Bloomberg campaign has yet to respond to a request for comment.
Bloomberg’s antipathy toward the AARP followed years of consistent advocacy for cuts to social programs. In February 2011 he told TIME magazine that Social Security was like Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. He told Fox News in April 2011 that Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security “need to be addressed,” and praised Ryan again, because “at least people are now talking about whether we can afford to continue to do what we've been doing.” In a signature speech at the Center for American Progress that November, he proposed $8 trillion in deficit reduction to balance the federal budget, including endorsing the recommendation of the Bowles-Simpson committee to gradually increase the retirement age. He described it as “reasonable entitlement reform.”
This continued in 2012, in an appearance on the now-defunct online news channel HuffPost Live. Bloomberg said that “we just can’t continue” with Medicare as it is, adding, “if we don’t do things like increasing the age at which you qualify for Social Security, you qualify for Medicare, or copays on Medicare and Medicaid so people think twice and only do things that are necessary, we’re just not going to be able to afford it.” He made the same call for rationing public insurance coverage to prevent the poor from accessing “too much” care with his friend, disgraced journalist Charlie Rose, on CBS News that year. He wanted to make sure “the services [Medicare and Medicaid recipients] use will be those that are really needed and not stuff that would be nice to have.” By the end of that year, Bloomberg was saddened in a Washington Post op-ed that proposed cuts to entitlements were “less than what I and many others believe are necessary to maximize long-term growth.”
In 2013, Bloomberg told CBS’s Face the Nation, “no program to reduce the deficit makes any sense whatsoever unless you address the issue of entitlements, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security…. Everything else is tiny compared to that.” Even during the Trump presidency, in December 2017, Bloomberg criticized the Trump tax cuts in an op-ed for the news outlet he owns, because cutting taxes “makes it more difficult for taxpayers to afford Medicare and Social Security for the baby boom generation, which is now hitting retirement.”
Bloomberg’s conversion into a mainstream liberal Democrat, right at the moment he entered the race, has led to a retirement security plan that would add a minimum benefit to Social Security, increase the cost of living adjustment to better align with costs for the elderly, add dental, vision, and hearing coverage to Medicare and Medicaid, and limit out-of-pocket drug costs on the public plans. That this is so at-odds with eight years of consistent advocacy for cuts to these programs and outright anger at those who would protect them makes it hard to believe Bloomberg would follow through on his newfound love of social insurance.
Even Bloomberg’s brand-new position is suspect, according to Nancy Altman and Linda Benesch of Social Security Works. They note that previous plans to cut Social Security like Bowles-Simpson and Paul Ryan’s plans also included targeted benefits. And they argue that Bloomberg’s vow to “consider options for preserving and strengthening Social Security’s long-term finances” and inability to unequivocally oppose cuts gives him wiggle room to support reductions down the road. “His language is insider speak, a wink and a nod to the donor class that he, like them, favors cutting Social Security,” Altman and Benesch write.
This decade-long flirtation with cuts threatens to undermine a gift that Donald Trump lobbed into the election campaign while in Davos earlier this year, where he said he would “take a look” at entitlement cuts “at the right time.” This was compounded by the Trump administration fiscal year 2021 budget, which included cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, and the disability side of Social Security. Bloomberg tried to exploit this issue last Sunday in a tweet, but his detailed, documented history of pushing for cuts to the same programs cuts against that.
