Although a Warren victory would be an unqualified disaster for the stock market and, arguably, for America, it’s harder to imagine what a Bloomberg presidency might look like. The left-leaning billionaire entered the race on Friday by filing for the Alabama primaries. This is a change of heart from a few months ago, when the news mogul announced he had no plans to run. He has stepped in because he’s concerned that none of the leading Democrats could beat Trump. He may be right, especially since Warren shot herself in the foot — and chest, and head — last week by spelling out exactly how she would pay for ‘Medicare for All’.
How’s That Again, Liz?
If there were any doubts that her ideas were hatched in the fever swamps of socialism, they have been dispelled by what she revealed of Warrencare. For starters, and as we already knew, everyone in America with an employer-based health plan would lose it. Billionaires like Bloomberg supposedly would pay for it, but if funding came up short, policy tweaks would make up the difference. How’s that again? Here’s Warren in her own wonky words: “I will use available policy tools, which include global budgets, population-based budgets and automatic rate reductions to bring it back in line.” Are you reassured? Even Piketty, the French leftist whose ideas Warren has borrowed from promiscuously and plagiarized, must be embarrassed by such claptrap.
Bloomberg, at 77, is a year younger than Sanders but robust and seemingly in good health, so age would not be a major factor. He could run a much better race against Trump than any of the current Democratic frontrunners — Warren, Sanders, Biden and Buttigieg. Unlike them, although Bloomberg is a meddlesome liberal who would want to intrude heavily on every area of our lives, including our diets, he is at least no loony leftist like most of the Democratic candidates. He is in fact very much a capitalist, for better or worse, and so Wall Street undoubtedly could live with him. If he were to win the election, the bull market probably wouldn’t miss a beat, assuming it was still chugging along a year from now. An added plus — for America and all mankind — is that a Bloomberg run would probably drive a stake through the heart of any Hillary candidacy, ending her political career once and for all