Part of my service to readers is the ongoing evaluation of the various candidates for the Democratic nomination for President, with emphasis on those candidates who seem to have some reasonable chance of rising into the top ranks and maybe even getting the nomination. Previous posts have focused mostly on Joe Biden (nine posts) and Elizabeth Warren (four posts). Both of those two now seem to be fading in the polls and in early results. (Can I claim some of the credit?)

Mike Bloomberg could be the guy who is now going to step in to fill the breach. Certainly, he has enough personal cash to far exceed the spending of the very best-funded candidate who relies on money raised from third parties. He is spending big in the Super Tuesday states, and focusing on behemoth California. So don’t count him out.

As things have heated up, Mayor Mike has started to go toe to toe with his rivals by putting out various plans and proposals to define his candidacy. My one prior post on his run, from January 12, examined Mike’s bright idea of declaring a war on poverty — while seemingly oblivious to the very existence of the initial-caps War on Poverty that was declared some 56 years ago by Lyndon Johnson, and continues to be waged to this day at an annual cost now exceeding $1 trillion, without achieving any measurable success. Mike’s big idea for his new “war” is a major federal effort in job training — again, in seeming total oblivity to the 43 (!) existing federal job training programs, all of which rank at the very bottom of effectiveness among federal programs (which is really saying something).

A few weeks have passed since that post, and Mike, to show he’s serious about this, needs to keep those plans and proposals flowing. So on Thursday of this week, out came the new one: his plan to fix, of all things, “inequality.” An op-ed in the New York Times on that day (headline: “Mike Bloomberg: Fixing Inequality Is My Priority”) was accompanied by a posting on his own campaign website laying out the full details.

Probably you are thinking, if this guy had any self-awareness at all, wouldn’t he stay as far away from this topic as possible? Let alone, if he’s actually serious about “fixing inequality,” wouldn’t the first thing he would need to do be to get rid of most of his own wealth and as well as that of his fellow mega-billionaires?

Yes and yes. But that’s not how this game works. This game works by proposing seemingly aggressive tax increases on high incomes to “make the rich pay more,” all carefully designed to avoid touching his own wealth in any material way. It’s cynically calculated misdirection. Do you fall for it?

As a little background, you need to understand that the mega-billionaires do not accumulate their wealth by means of anything counted as “income,” let alone subject to taxation. Rather, the basic idea is that they own assets — stock in a company, or maybe buildings — that increase in value. The increase in value is called “unrealized capital gains,” which do not count as income. Warren Buffett with Berkshire Hathaway; Bill Gates with Microsoft; Mike Bloomberg with Bloomberg LP; Donald Trump with his real estate assets: this is how they all accumulated their wealth, with most to nearly all of it going un-taxed on the way up. And once you have accumulated the billions in assets, there are various ways of extracting cash from the situation in ways that also don’t count as “income.” The most obvious is to take out a loan secured by the appreciated assets.

Note that I am not saying that it would be a good idea to try to tax unrealized capital gains or loans against appreciated assets. Trying to implement either of those would pose serious problems for the tax system. However, I am saying that without some big redefinition of what constitutes taxable income, you are not going to capture any meaningful amount of the wealth of the mega-billionaires like Mike Bloomberg, nor are you going to prevent the ongoing creation of more of such billionaires.

With that background, let’s take a look at Mike Bloomberg’s plan to “fix inequality.”

• Item 1 is “Raise rates for high income taxpayers.” “Reverse the Trump tax changes for high-income households, restoring the top rate on ordinary income from 37% to 39.6%.” I’m not saying that Mike doesn’t get a dime in the form of “ordinary income” in any given year, but without doubt the amount of that is insignificant to his overall financial wealth, which was accumulated without being taxed.

• Item 2 is “Tax capital gains more equitably.” “Tax capital gains at the same rate as ordinary income for taxpayers above $1 million. Taxes won’t rise on the savings of ordinary taxpayers.” I guess we can infer from that that Mike isn’t planning to sell Bloomberg LP any time soon. And after all, why should he? So this is another tax that will fall on somebody else.

• Item 3 is “Impose a new tax on the very rich.” “A 5% surtax on incomes above $5 million a year.” Again, this is a tax on ordinary income — a very small part of Mike’s financial picture — that leaves his accumulated wealth (and that of the other billionaires) untouched, while hitting mostly some high end professionals or corporate executives.

There are other items, but you get the picture. All of these are tweaks to the tax code, supposedly to extract more revenue from the “rich,” but with “rich” always defined to mean people of high ordinary income rather than “rich” the way Mike and other mega-billionaires got rich. Also, none of the proposals addresses in any way the other side of income inequality, namely the bottom of the income distribution. Unless, of course, you are hoping that the new federal programs to be financed by these tax increases will somehow lift up the poor the way the 56 year War on Poverty has not (10 more federal job training programs to add to the current 43?).

Note also that when you read about “income inequality,” whether from government announcements or from mainstream press, the inequality you read about is almost always pre-tax and pre-benefits, rather than post-tax and post-benefits. Yes, you can find post-tax, post-benefit income inequality figures for the United States if you look hard enough, and I have tried to find and publicize some of them at this site. But the enactment of all of these changes proposed by Bloomberg will not change in any way the pre-tax income inequality figures that are currently, and will surely continue to be, hyped by the government and the press as if we did not have a progressive tax code and a trillion dollars of annual redistributions. In short, it’s all a shell game, carefully designed to deceive the gullible.

Just one more point: Have you noticed the aggressive campaign by the press and by Democratic politicians to get their hands on Mike Bloomberg’s tax returns? Neither have I. You may be aware of the extreme efforts in multiple quarters by people trying to get President Trump’s tax returns and other financial records. Not only have there been strident calls in the press for those to be produced, but the New York Attorney General has aggressively joined the fray, subpoenaing not only Trump himself, but also his accountants and banks, and litigating the issue diligently through the courts. Bloomberg’s tax returns? They couldn’t be less interested, as far as I can determine, even though it is obvious that Bloomberg’s wealth is a multiple that of Trump. Could this possibly be because Bloomberg is running as a Democrat?

You may be interested to learn that Bloomberg did a kabuki form of disclosure of redacted versions of his tax returns back during the period when he was Mayor of New York City (2002-13). Here is an article from the New York Times in May 2013, on the occasion of the final such disclosure during Bloomberg’s term as Mayor. Basically, all that Bloomberg disclosed was that his taxable “income” was “more than $500,000” and that his tax rates (on “income” as defined) were 34.69 % federal, 8.82% state, and 3.88% city. Again, brilliant mis-direction. The Times reporter was not curious enough to inquire as to whether Bloomberg may have had ways of accumulating great wealth that did not constitute “income.”