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For what it is worth, I got text asking for donation to Bloomberg's campaign. So I would not expect Bloomberg not taking money from large donors.

pjlegato 7y ago
Bloomberg doesn't need money. He solicits donations because the act of donating money causes the donator to feel personally invested in the campaign. They will be more likely to take steps to influence their friends and family to vote for Bloomberg, and more likely to actually bother to vote themselves, than someone who hasn't. This is the same reason governments sell war bonds -- they don't actually need the $100. It rather serves to make ordinary people feel they are contributing something to the cause.
- refurb 7y ago
  War bonds actually raised a ton of money to support WW2. The govt actually needed that money.
- bzbarsky 7y ago
  The reason to sell war bonds in a fiat money world, at a base level, is that you want to devote some resources to the war effort, and therefore those resources are not available to produce consumer goods. Now there are two options. Either the consumers have just as much money chasing a smaller amount of goods, leading to inflation, or you need to reduce the amount of money consumers have. Selling bonds is a mechanism for doing the latter. The end result is the same: the war effort means lower living standards, whether through inflation or through people voluntarily forgoing consumption by purchasing war bonds; the latter happens to make people less upset and likely has different distributional characteristics, so is probably a better idea. Note that there are various details like whether your economy is at capacity (and if it's not, maybe you can do the war effort production _and_ still produce the goods consumers want by expanding overall production). And there can be various different mechanisms which lead to inflation in practice, ranging from "printing money" to pay for the cost of the war effort production, thus bidding up prices in general, to establishing rationing and a corresponding black market with high prices. In a non-fiat-money world, there can be other reasons to do war bonds, of course, including "getting some of whatever counts as money", since the government does not control the supply of that.
- hippich 7y ago
  Your idea makes sense. I guess there are always exceptions to any rule - I shared screenshot of that text and link to the amount of Bloomberg's wealth with my friends asking reasonable question - if he wants to help people, why he asking them to donate all the while sitting on $60B+ of own wealth.

pjlegato 7y ago

Bloomberg doesn't need money. He solicits donations because the act of donating money causes the donator to feel personally invested in the campaign. They will be more likely to take steps to influence their friends and family to vote for Bloomberg, and more likely to actually bother to vote themselves, than someone who hasn't. This is the same reason governments sell war bonds -- they don't actually need the $100. It rather serves to make ordinary people feel they are contributing something to the cause.

refurb 7y ago
War bonds actually raised a ton of money to support WW2. The govt actually needed that money.
bzbarsky 7y ago
The reason to sell war bonds in a fiat money world, at a base level, is that you want to devote some resources to the war effort, and therefore those resources are not available to produce consumer goods. Now there are two options. Either the consumers have just as much money chasing a smaller amount of goods, leading to inflation, or you need to reduce the amount of money consumers have. Selling bonds is a mechanism for doing the latter. The end result is the same: the war effort means lower living standards, whether through inflation or through people voluntarily forgoing consumption by purchasing war bonds; the latter happens to make people less upset and likely has different distributional characteristics, so is probably a better idea. Note that there are various details like whether your economy is at capacity (and if it's not, maybe you can do the war effort production _and_ still produce the goods consumers want by expanding overall production). And there can be various different mechanisms which lead to inflation in practice, ranging from "printing money" to pay for the cost of the war effort production, thus bidding up prices in general, to establishing rationing and a corresponding black market with high prices. In a non-fiat-money world, there can be other reasons to do war bonds, of course, including "getting some of whatever counts as money", since the government does not control the supply of that.
hippich 7y ago
Your idea makes sense. I guess there are always exceptions to any rule - I shared screenshot of that text and link to the amount of Bloomberg's wealth with my friends asking reasonable question - if he wants to help people, why he asking them to donate all the while sitting on $60B+ of own wealth.