Billions of dollars can buy you a lot–for example, a little toy called New York City that you pocket for yourself and, then, keep for yourself even when the rules say it’s time to go (hey, if you’ve got billions, you can buy off politicians to let you keep the toy for a little longer). Mainly it can buy you a platform where you can say anything, bloviate even when you have your facts wrong and, to boot, tell everyone else why they need to suffer, while you continue to live like a King.

    In fairness to King Mike Bloomberg, he isn’t alone in spreading utter nonsense about the phony debt and deficit "crisis". But, he gets away with it. Why? Because he has billions of dollars. Today, he showed how money talks.

Today, King Mike ventured to Washington D.C. to join the Very Serious People and unleash a tongue-lashing to the politicians who won’t follow King Mike’s advice to impose some honest-to-goodness austerity on the rest of the unwashed masses. Courtesy of the "liberal" Center for American Progress, King Mike ranted:

In a speech in Washington on Tuesday morning, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg called on both parties to reach an agreement on spending cuts and tax increases that would balance the federal budget in 10 years.

Mr. Bloomberg has discussed the deficit frequently in recent months, describing it as a major problem for the country’s economy and scolding “both sides of the aisle” and “both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue” for failing to address it.

….

Saying that businesses remain unwilling to take risks because of their lack of confidence in the economic policies coming out of Washington, Mr. Bloomberg argued that more government spending and tax cuts would not stimulate job growth — effectively dismissing the efficacy of President Obama’s jobs bill.

Instead, he said, the only way to stimulate the economy is by reducing the deficit. With a Congressional committee on deficit reduction facing a deadline of Nov. 23 to agree on at least $1.2 trillion in savings, Mr. Bloomberg said that making only those cuts — or, worse, failing to reach a deal at all — would be disastrous for the American economy.

Instead, he urged the committee to come up with a “bold, long-term, and comprehensive plan” to stabilize the budget and proposed several steps that he said would balance the budget by 2021.

   Read the speech at the end of the article. There is so much billionaire bullshit there it’s hard to choose. But here are my favorites:

“Companies do not make major investments when the future of tax and regulatory policies are so up in the air. Every CEO and business leader that I speak with says virtually the same thing: They are not going to make major investment decisions until they know how Washington intends to grapple with our huge deficits. And right now, they have no idea how or if that’s going to be accomplished.

“That uncertainty is a major drag on job creation – because the price of uncertainty for business is paralysis. Decision-makers abhor a lack of clarity. You can price tax increases and labor costs into your business plan and still invest and grow.

    Nonsense. King Mike invokes the specter of "every CEO and business leader" he speaks to (which ones?) by conjuring up the "confidence fairy". Let me turn to Paul Krugman regarding the "confidence fairy":

For the last few months, I and others have watched, with amazement and horror, the emergence of a consensus in policy circles in favor of immediate fiscal austerity. That is, somehow it has become conventional wisdom that now is the time to slash spending, despite the fact that the world’s major economies remain deeply depressed.

This conventional wisdom isn’t based on either evidence or careful analysis. Instead, it rests on what we might charitably call sheer speculation, and less charitably call figments of the policy elite’s imagination — specifically, on belief in what I’ve come to think of as the invisible bond vigilante and the confidence fairy.

…

What’s the evidence for the belief that fiscal contraction is actually expansionary, because it improves confidence? (By the way, this is precisely the doctrine expounded by Herbert Hoover in 1932.) Well, there have been historical cases of spending cuts and tax increases followed by economic growth. But as far as I can tell, every one of those examples proves, on closer examination, to be a case in which the negative effects of austerity were offset by other factors, factors not likely to be relevant today. For example, Ireland’s era of austerity-with-growth in the 1980s depended on a drastic move from trade deficit to trade surplus, which isn’t a strategy everyone can pursue at the same time.

….

So the next time you hear serious-sounding people explaining the need for fiscal austerity, try to parse their argument. Almost surely, you’ll discover that what sounds like hardheaded realism actually rests on a foundation of fantasy, on the belief that invisible vigilantes will punish us if we’re bad and the confidence fairy will reward us if we’re good. And real-world policy — policy that will blight the lives of millions of working families — is being built on that foundation.

[emphasis added]

    Now, you can choose to believe King Mike, who is entirely tone-deaf when it comes to the lives of real people because he does not live like a real person. Or you can believe a Nobel Prize-winning economist.

    Back to King Mike:

“Real deficit reduction means more jobs today and tomorrow. But real deficit reduction requires real political courage – and that, unfortunately, is the biggest deficit we face.

   Complete nonsense. Actually, cutting government means fewer jobs.

   Ah, political courage. You mean, the political courage that King Mike showed when, rather than leaving the mayor’s post after two terms, he found the city so in need of his leadership that he bought a third term.

    King Mike:

“Last summer, we saw the depths of Washington’s dysfunction, when the gridlock over how to cut the nation’s spiraling deficit sunk our perfect credit rating, sent the financial markets tumbling downward, and made the credit rating agencies the target of a witch hunt.

“In the span of those two months, Washington did more to hurt our economy – not to mention our reputation as a reliable steward of democracy and free markets – than it had done to help our economy over the previous two years. Whatever faith Americans had in Washington’s ability to function was almost totally destroyed. At the time, it felt like rock bottom for our political system.

    There is so much that is ludicrous and clueless here in just two paragraphs.

   One: the credit agencies were targets not because of a witch hunt but because they are completely and utterly useless tools of Wall Street and were a significant enabler of the financial crisis and are under investigation for that pathetic role (read here, here and here). But, understand, King Mike lives in the world where everyone bows down to credit agencies–it’s part of the entire corrupt system.

    Two: Washington hurt the economy? Really. Uh, well, I wonder what the financial crisis had to do with that. King Mike can’t see that a majority of the people now believe that "the country’s economic structures favor an affluent elite"–and that that elite is served by the political system, which refuses to jail any of King Mike’s close friends in Wall Street who are the central reason for our economic crisis.

    I only want to add one more–though this whole speech is a living testament to a man who is entirely in love with his own voice and entirely out of touch with reality. Here is where he goes after Social Security:

“When you look at Social Security’s underlying numbers, the need for reform is undeniable – especially when you consider that one of every two children born today is likely to live to be more than 100 years old. That’s great news for the next generation. But to support their retirements, we’re going to have to adjust.

“Already, Social Security is the greatest transfer of wealth in the history of the world – with the possible exception of OPEC. And as fewer and fewer workers support more and more retirees, that transfer will get ever more burdensome for American workers. In 1950, there were 16 workers for every one retiree, which kept taxes reasonably low for each worker. Today, there are only 3.3 workers for every retiree. And 15 years from now, the number is expected to be only two workers per retiree. That means Americans will spend more and more of every day working to support other people’s retirement, instead of supporting their own families.

“The sooner we address this problem, the more gradually we can phase in changes. By making modest adjustments to future benefits now, by slowly and gradually phasing in a higher retirement age over the next six decades, and by adopting the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ more accurate measure of the Consumer Price Index, known as the Chain Weighted CPI, which seems to be a point of agreement on the Super Committee, we can make Social Security solvent for the next 75 years – and we can make sure that young people of tomorrow are not spending far more of their income supporting seniors than the young people of today.

    Social Security has not contributed one dime to the debt. Not one. And isn’t it…can I say "rich"…that a billionaire, who will never need to live on Social Security, is suggesting "modest adjustments" to future benefits.

    Okay, done. This isn’t just about King Mike. It’s about a disease that has taken hold of the political world.