Ashlee Rezin Garcia/Chicago Sun-Times via AP
Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg, left, greets supporters after speaking in Chicago, January 8, 2020, where he unveiled a plan to combat national economic inequality.
Michael Bloomberg has discovered economic inequality, but before we say, “Better late than never,” it’s just one kind of economic inequality: the kind that won’t require a solution that would diminish Hizzoner’s fortune.
What Bloomberg has unearthed is “an economic inequality that is distributed unfairly across this country,” for which he is proposing a “concrete strategy for spreading good jobs and good pay to places where they don’t exist now,” as The New York Times’ Jim Tankersley has reported.
American capital’s abandonment of non-metropolitan America is by now a well-documented fact; here at the Prospect, we’ve been covering it for many years. Those regions need the kind of massive public investment once directed their way by the New Deal, which electrified rural America and brought hydropower to regions that the private sector had systematically neglected, then as now. That Bloomberg presumably wishes to renew such investments is a good thing.
But that appears to exhaust his commitments to reducing inequality. He overlooks the fact that America’s “thriving” cities are the nation’s most unequal sector, where retail and service-sector workers try to scrape by as those employed in finance and tech gobble up all the income and wealth. You’d think a guy who was mayor of New York for three terms might have noticed that.
Nor is Bloomberg a fan of imposing a wealth tax to fund the rudiments of a more egalitarian society, like universal free child care and preschool. He’s also no fan of a financial-transaction tax, or putting workers on corporate boards, or curtailing the activities of hedge funds or private equity—you get the picture. Bloomberg’s battle against economic inequality doesn’t touch Wall Street, doesn’t touch wealth, doesn’t touch, well, Bloomberg.
