Here's Why Bloomberg should be Obama's VP!

Economic Chops - Bloomberg worked his way up from a $9,000-a-year job and grew it into a 20 billion dollar juggernut through smart investments and a brilliant understanding of the economy. He predicted the oil shortage, housing and mortgage crisis years before others did, unfortunately no one was listening.

Major crime has dropped 30% in New York in the Bloomberg era, without the racial antagonisms of the Giuliani era. Test scores and graduation rates are up, unemployment is at a record low, welfare rolls are at a 40-year low, construction is booming, the deficit has become a surplus, and the city's bond rating just hit an all-time high of double-A. As Mayor, he has driven crime down, rebuilt neighborhoods, kept the streets clean, overhauled the schools and more. New Yorkers are even living longer than they used to. He raised $50 million in private money, including some of his own millions, to fund a pilot workfare program.

He has a long history of implementing Innovative Brilliant Ideas That People Though Couldn't Work but Wound Up Working...

a.) Years ago, he said that gas prices were going to explode, and introduced a controversial plan to switch all of New York's cabs with hybrid that get excellent milage. And he pulled it off! Now New York City's cabs are all hybrids!

b.) He saw obesity and heart disease as major problems and introduced what many people at the time claimed was an unfeasible plan that gradually banned ALL transfats in all foods sold in New York. New York is such a huge corporate market, that by implementing this, Bloomberg forced McDonalds, Burger King, Fritos Lays potato chips and all other junk food companies to switch away from all transfats, if they want to be able to sell their product in New York. Whether you realize it or not, thanks to Bloomberg, regardless of where you live, you have been eating all junk food and fast food that are free of transfats. Have you noticed any difference in taste? Didn't think so. But you've been eating healthier without even realizing it.

c.) He passed a similar plan banning smoking in all public places in New York. Air pollution went down, and when other key cities saw from Bloomberg how large scale smoking bans can feasibly be implemented, they adopted his identical plan in London, Paris and other cities. They are also now following his same model to replace all public transportation with hybrids in their cities.

f.) He broke with 200 years of tradition by rearranging city hall into a bullpen modeled on a trading floor, with his desk in the middle of 50 aides. (Perhaps transparency breeds loyalty, because his senior staff has barely changed in six years.) His office also seems to be the most productive mayor's office in New York City's history.

g.) "The naysayers who think global warming is too big a problem just don't have any vision," he repeatedly says. Washington rejected the Kyoto Protocol, but more than 500 U.S. mayors have pledged to meet its emissions-reduction standards, none more aggressively than Bloomberg who initially led this Mayors initiative. His PlaNYC calls for a 30% cut in greenhouse gases by 2030.

All of the above were controversial plans when introduced. Bloomberg inherited a tough situation. The city was hemorrhaging jobs after the Sept. 11 attacks, and Giuliani's second-term spending spree had left the city in a financial hole. Bloomberg raised property taxes 18% to attack the deficit, and he made some modest but politically difficult spending cuts, including the closing of several firehouses. He also engineered a hostile takeover of the city's troubled schools and banned smoking in the city's restaurants and bars. His approval ratings sagged into the 20s; his constituents booed him at parades. "They'll come around," he told aides.

And just as he said, he bounced back from poison-ivy approval ratings to easy re-elections in influential places when his controversial policies began to work exactly as he said they would. He now reportedly tells his advisors when introducing these plans, "What good is a 70% approval rating if we don't take risks?" So far, that rating hasn't budged. Bloomberg isn't just a technocrat, he's an extraordinarily good one, a quality that you see all to rarely.

He took on predatory lending in New York years before politicians realize how big a problem it was. As a philanthropist, he's funding research designed to eliminate malaria by building a better mosquito.

There's a good view of Bloomberg's problem solving from the roof of the 123-unit building Ken Haron just developed in Harlem. That neighborhood was once a national symbol of urban decay — drugs, violence, all the classic inner-city problems — but now its main problem is that it's so desirable, its housing is unaffordable. And in recent decades, the feds have stopped building subsidized housing. So Bloomberg has leveraged private money for a $7.5 billion effort to create 165,000 affordable apartments, enough to house the population of Atlanta. It's already one-third complete.

To Bloomberg, Washington means gridlock, extremism and pettiness. It's the place where homeland-security funds were "spread out like peanut butter" for political reasons, so that rural states got more per capita than New York. In 2005, after a rash of shootings, Bloomberg's aides told him that 90% of the illegal guns used in local crimes came from out of state and that 1% of U.S. gun dealers supplied 60% of its crime guns. And the Bush Administration had stopped tracking the problem; in fact, the G.O.P. Congress had enacted N.R.A.-backed language restricting federal officials from sharing gun-trace information with local police. Bloomberg appealed to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales but got the brush-off. So the mayor hired investigators to run stings in gun shops nationwide and sued 27 of the shadiest dealers; a dozen are now under court supervision. He also started Mayors Against Illegal Guns to fight the information-sharing restrictions.

Seriously,

If you live in Southern California, $200,000 a year is middle class. Homes here cost over $600,000 and can easily top 1 million.

It sounds like a huge amount of money when people in the heartland make a good living at $40,000. But when you can buy a nice home for $100,000 that 40K goes a good bit further.

I know many people who make 40K in Ohio and have more disposable income that people making 250K here in California.

Treating people who make 250K a year the same as those making Millions is just wrong. They are not comparable.