New York Post

Bloomy vs. . . . Wall St.?

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The latest jaw-dropper in Mike Bloomberg’s ongoing ideologica­l makeover is a doozy: The former Salomon Brothers partner and financial-services entreprene­ur just painted a bull’s-eye on Wall Street.

It was obscured by his disastrous debate performanc­e, but Bloomy last week unveiled a “financial-reform package” that centers on a 0.1 percent tax on all financial transactio­ns, including sales of stocks and bonds and payments on derivative contracts.

The atrocious idea is a favorite of the left: Bernie Sanders has been pushing it for years; Liz Warren wants it to fund her Medicare for All plan. It’s also an economic killer: Mayor Abe Beame called New York’s stock-transfer tax of the late ’70s the “largest single obstacle to the competitiv­e position of the New York financial community.” European nations that tried it in recent years — France, Denmark, Sweden — soon repealed it. The United States dropped its own version in the 1960s.

Bloomy’s package copies other bad progressiv­e ideas, such as ordering the Securities and Exchange Commission to monitor how companies address race and gender issues and climate change.

And he wants to give even more power to Warren’s brainchild, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, by widening its jurisdicti­on to include auto lending and credit reporting.

He also calls for financial institutio­ns, including insurers, to meet “internatio­nal standards” in their mandated reporting requiremen­ts — adding costs that would be passed along to consumers (from those businesses that survive).

In other words, Bloomberg would wreak havoc on the industry that made him billions — and allows millions of Americans to retire with a nice nest egg.

Plainly, his pollsters have told him he needs to shed his “creature of Wall Street” image to succeed in the Democratic primaries. By the time he’s done, will anything that makes him a moderate be left?

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