Bloomberg's $34m presidential campaign ad-buy is 1.1% of the taxes Bernie, Warren and Steyer want him to pay

Sure, the Demopublican Centrist Michael Bloomberg is spending a lot of money on his presidential bid, but the former mayor has a lot more money: $52 billion.

Bloomberg is running in part because he opposes the progressive candidates "extreme wealth taxes" which would see him paying $3.7b under a Sanders presidency, $3b under a Warren presidency or $512m under a Steyer presidency -- per year.

That $32m that Bloomberg has dumped into his ad-buy? It's 1.1% of the tax bill he'd owe under Warren in the first year.

Lavish political spending is a rational calculus when it comes to the ultra-rich: the Kochs -- who have been pouring money into oligarch-friendly organizations and campaigns for a generation -- have seen a massive return on their investments. Amazon was making a similar calculus when it dumped unprecedented sums into the local Seattle elections -- though Amazon's investment failed in large part because the impropriety was so blatant that it motivated voters to cast ballots against it.

As Alexis Goldstein points out in the New Republic, Bloomberg doesn't have to win the election for his investment to pay off -- all he has to do is discredit the politicians arguing for a wealth tax. And that's before you calculate the benefits to Bloomberg of snuffing out the movement to reform Wall Street, whose subscription fees to "Bloomberg terminals" put that $52b in his pocket in the first place.

It is hard to say what the perfect billionaire hedge against a Warren or Sanders administration would look like.