Michael Bloomberg, New York's mayor, is a multi-billionaire businessman. His predecessor, former prosecutor Rudy Giuliani, is credited with cleaning up the city's awful crime mess. Bloomberg has revitalized the city's economic life and made it easier for those in need. Yesterday, with our nation on the brink of an economic catastrophe that would hurt every American and reach far beyond our borders, Tom Brokaw interviewed him on NBC's Meet the Press. From the program's transcript, here are some of Michael Bloomberg's remarks:
"There are two crises. One is the crisis in the financial market, a lack of confidence that almost closed down the financial system this past week and that Hank (Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson) has to address. And it's up to the Treasury with the acquiescence of Congress, but to do something quickly. And nobody knows exactly what they should do, but anything is better than nothing. You've got to restore the public's belief and the market's belief that we will go on. And this is not just an American problem, it's financial markets around the world that are all interlinked and they're all collapsing. The second problem, which is up to Congress, it's a much longer-term problem and may be the genesis of the problem that we have today in the financial markets, and that is that people are losing their homes, deserted homes are destroying neighborhoods, people are losing their jobs. We have some industries that Congress tried to protect, and instead of protecting them they've caused them to not keep up in a competitive world with new products. We have an education system that isn't preparing us for the future, and we have a retirement system that's just not going to be there when we need it. So there's two things here: One you got to do quickly; one you really need a lot more thought about and that Congress should spend that time debating. But I don't know that there's time for a lot of the debate now."
"Our regulation in this country is designed for the world of 50 years ago. We have separate regulation for different industries, except today those industries all do the same thing. Also, our regulation isn't consistent with regulation around the world. And every company, every bank, your job, my job, all our jobs depend on commerce and what happens elsewheres in the world. And we have to find a ways to, to pull together, in Congress not have all of the different oversight committees, in the executive branch not have all the different agencies, and not just think that we're the only ones that can do this, but pull it all together. Paulson's been talking about it for a long time. But I think it, Tom, it comes out of this instant gratification. We all were happy when the stock market was going up, we were all happy when there was all this money sloshing around in the economy, and everybody could get a loan whether they could pay it back or not. When companies went out and bought other companies and people got great bonuses, it was great. And nobody wanted to say, 'Wait a second, this can't go on forever.' I'm happy to say in New York, at least, we didn't think it was going to go on forever and for the last couple years we've been salting away money. I don't know that we've salted away enough, but we've been saying again and again nothing goes up in a straight line forever."
"But I think--let me get back to this bipartisan or partisan thing. What the Democrats have to understand is that while we do need to reform our regulation and we do need more restrictions, it is true that it is capitalism and free enterprise and companies that create jobs and wealth for every American. And what the Republicans have to understand is, while it may be capitalism and free enterprise and companies that create jobs, we have to have regulations that are realistic and they have to be followed. And I think if both parties could learn that and come together then there really isn't that much difference between them, and they can go and take this country to the next level."
".......... the executive branch of government has to be the solution, and that's the lack of confidence in our financial markets and in the institutions that make up those markets. The other is the longer-term focusing on the problems that, in the end, got us here. We, we spend money we don't have. We have trillion dollar deficits. We have a birth rate that's too low to support Social Security. We have a health care system that's going to bankrupt us. We're going to spend 25 percent of our GNP on health care, and we get worse health care than they do in western Europe and they spend less money. Our public education system throughout this country--we worked hard on it in New York--but we all have--and other cities are doing it, too--but we have a long ways to go."
"We have an energy policy--we're transferring our wealth to overseas to a bunch of countries that don't have the same values as us. In some cases, they're using our money to finance terrorism against us. We've got to sit down--infrastructure as well. There's a whole list of things. Immigration. We don't have an intelligent policy. Those are the things we've got to do. But that has got to be done in Congress. It needs leadership from the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, from the White House, but it needs bipartisan cooperation no matter how this next election turns out."
"We can't spend our time talking about the bailouts in the past. You've got an automobile industry that has--in Detroit they've cut employment from 500,000 people down to 250,000 people. That's 250,000 Americans. You know what a group of 250,000 people--it's a lot of people. They've lost their jobs. Today, if they have jobs, they probably don't have as good jobs. Why? What were we doing wrong? I would argue that we tried to protect an industry where we should have been assisting people. We should have been working on training, we should have been working on regulation that would force them to come up with products that are good for the world so that they can sell them and keep their--keep jobs, good-paying jobs with benefits. That's what we're trying to do in this country. And where you let the free markets work, generally it does. But free markets cannot work without some regulation."
".......... economists will make the argument that capital gains taxes going up will dissuade people to invest. People will make the argument that it's not fair that some people make their money in capital gains form rather than an ordinary income. I'll leave that for the economists and the tax policy writers to debate. But I think everybody understands we like to have lower taxes. But if we want services, we're going to have to pay for them. And the worst thing we're doing is to do the worst--take the services but not have us pay for them. That's the situation where we're going to lead--leave a terrible world for our children and grandchildren."
Michael Bloomberg's wisdom far exceeds the combined knowledge of Barack Obama and John McCain. As a candidate for president, he would be a tremendous improvement over the poor choices we are now confronted with. It was reported that Bloomberg considered a run at the White House as an independent. That never came to fruition because, under our electoral system, an independent canditate really has no chance of being elected president. What a shame!
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