Bloomberg:Obama's Greatest Challenge is Education
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg just spent 20 minutes speaking with New York Times' chairman Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. at theNew York Forum.
Following are some of the highlights from that conversation:
- The government's first job is to promote economic activity. Give people the ability to enjoy life, keep food on plate, roof on head.
- The big problem NY State faces is that its number one industry is finance. Washington has forgotten that the economic engine for the United States is finance. Nothing works without it. Credit derivative swaps don't sound good, so the government decided to go after the banks. That is potentially very damaging to the country. If you want to create jobs you have to have banks willing to provide loans. You can't have it both ways.
- The U.S. immigration policy is national suicide: "We educate the best and the brightest and then we don't give them a green card. We want the best entrepreneurs in the world but won't let them come here." (This echoes comments made by Rupert Murdoch and Jerry Speyer last night.)
- When asked by Sulzberger what he sees as potential growth areas for New York, Bloomberg responded that New York City is trying very hard to diversify its economy across all five bureaus. When the financial sector doesn't do well, however, that dries up everything. But he added that New York City is becoming the IT capital of the world.
- New York's value proposition is its intellectual property. NYC is never going to be able to compete with Eastern China and Bangladesh where labor cost is very low. That's something we can't compete in. NYC is the intellectual capital of the world.
- If your business depends on smart people, said Bloomberg, we want to make sure that you can't survive unless you are here. That includes lowering crimes, having parks and cleaning up streets. We see that working, he added, that's why New York City is doing much better than other cities in the country and other cities in the world.
- Bloomberg also touched on New York City's diversity in culture, race and ethnicity. We learn to live next to each other in ways that people in other cities never do, he said.
- Some lessons Bloomberg has learned over the years: Competition is what drives all of us. For example, in education, charter schools gives traditional schools some competition, private schools give public schools some competition. The percentage of people in NYC that are college