Even now, Giuliani touts his ‘fiscal conservatism’

December 3, 2007

After an unusually rough week, Rudy Giuliani has apparently decided he can help get his campaign back on track by focusing on his economic beliefs. Today, the former mayor has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, though it doesn’t take too long to start noticing its flaws. Here’s the first paragraph:

With economic uncertainty weighing on the minds of many Americans, Congress is preparing to recess after another year of profligate spending, protectionist talk and promises of higher taxes. No wonder some people feel like we’re moving in the wrong direction. But I’m optimistic as I look to the future. It’s not our country that’s moving in the wrong direction — it’s Congress, and Washington’s culture of wasteful spending.

Yes, Rudy Giuliani considers himself an authority on wasteful spending. It’s an odd choice for him to make right now. After all, we’ve learned over the last several days that the former mayor spent quite a few tax dollars on security details for his wife and mistress simultaneously, spent quite a few more to allow his mistress to use the NYPD as a cab- and dog-walking service, and then hid the costs in the budgets of obscure mayoral offices, apparently hoping no one would notice.

So we should elect him president, Giuliani argues, so he can clean up DC’s “culture of wasteful spending.” Um, how do I put this gently … even a fool wouldn’t buy into such nonsense.

Indeed, the rest of the WSJ piece is more a joke than a serious statement of policy.

We need to keep taxes low for our economy to grow. It’s not just a theory for me. I cut taxes 23 times as mayor of New York City with a Democratic City Council and State Assembly, and saw that lower taxes can result in higher revenue.

I feel comfortable calling this a “lie,” not only because it’s false, but because Giuliani knows it’s false. To arrive at his number, Giuliani has to claim credit for tax cuts initiated by others, tax cuts he opposed, and in one instance, he counts one tax cut twice. Best of all, Giuliani includes a scuttled tax increase on his list. (“We don’t consider not raising a tax a tax cut,” Charles Brescher of the city’s Independent Budget Office recently said.) Giuliani has been confronted with reality many times since he started making the bogus claim, but he still makes it.

Republicans have a clearer understanding of how our economy works.

A few paragraphs earlier, Giuliani lamented the huge increase in spending that happened under a Republican Congress with a Republican president.

This summer, I unveiled my tax plan, which committed to making the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts permanent, while aiming for still-lower marginal rates. We’ll give the death tax the death penalty, index the Alternative Minimum Tax for inflation as a step toward eliminating it entirely, expand tax-free savings accounts, and expand health-care choice through tax reform. We also need to reduce the corporate tax rate.

Giuliani is describing a series of cuts that will cost hundreds of billions of dollars, all to benefit the same people who’ve been lavished with tax cuts for the last seven years. It’s so absurdly irresponsible, it almost makes Bush and Cheney look reasonable.

[W]e can both save money and provide better services by consolidating duplicative programs. We don’t need 342 economic development programs or 130 programs serving at risk youth or 72 federal programs dedicated to ensuring safe water (according to a 2004 report). No doubt many of these programs are worthy, but citizens shouldn’t have to navigate a maze of overlapping bureaucracies.

What’s that going to save, a few million here and there? By making safe water a little less safe? That won’t pay for a single tax cut — that won’t even pay for a single day of a single tax cut.

Reforming a culture of wasteful spending requires standing up to special interests and insisting on transparency and accountability.

I assume Giuliani is aware of the fact that we know he hid his sex-on-the-city costs in budgets responsible for regulating loft apartments, aiding the disabled, and providing lawyers for indigent defendants, right? And he wants to emphasize “transparency and accountability”? Seriously?

Honestly, it’s as if Giuliani is trying to become a laughingstock.

If only Jon Stewart were on the air to cover this….

Charles Brecher is with the Citizen’s Budget Commission, a privately funded organization concerned with the finances and services of NYC’s and NYS’s budgets, not the Independent Budget Office, which is a city government agency.

  • I do miss Jon Stewart. I think The Carpetbagger Report should make an offer to his on-strike writers to publish their bons mots here before the march of time makes them irrelevant?

  • The “economic uncertainty weighing on the minds of many Americans” is not spending by Congress, it’s coming from what Atrios aptly calls the Big Sh*tpile or the subprime crisis. While I would like very much to see Congress no longer fund military adventurism in Iraq and to get rid of the Office of Faith-based Initiatives, I’d really like to see business reigned in from distributing the risk of an enormous amount of lousy loans that fueled a housing bubble onto a wide array of unsuspecting debt holders. Economic uncertainty is realizing your retirement fund is now rife with defaulting mortgage debt that someone else made a ton of money on and all of sudden my supposedly safe investments are left holding the bag. Rudy’s wrong yet again.

  • Let’s not forget that well-spent money on Georgie”s and Dickie’s Big Adventure to Iraq and Back.

  • When Mitt took his family on a cross-country vacation some years ago, he put the family mutt in a cage strapped to the top of the family station wagon. The dog defecated while the car was zooming down the highway, and the wind blew some of the dog shit back onto the car’s rear window. Mitt eventually stopped the car, found a hose, and cleaned the back of the car by spraying water on it.

    While mayor of NYC, Rudy arranged for some NYC cops to walk his mistress’s dog, and, presumeably, pick up any crap that came out of the dog’s butt. These cops were working at the time, on the taxpayers’ dime.

    To me, these two anecdotes prove that Romney is more of a small-government fiscal conservative than is Giuliani. At least when it comes to cleaning up dog poop, Mitt believes private citizens should take matters into their own hands, so to speak, and not rely on the government to do it for them. Giuliani, on the other hand, obviously believes in a public-sector solution to this problem.

    Giuliani decries D.C.’s “culture of wasteful spending” while ignoring the culture of dog-waste spending he himself put in place.

  • I guess Rudy can’t just openly admit that he’d squander our tax dollars and funnel the funds into the pockets of his buddies. But he would have a bigger budget to chauffeur his new batch of mistresses around.

  • This op-ed must be the introduction to the new Giuliani Plan: A Money Tree for Every American (it’s “a chicken in every pot” for the new age), and why not? If you believe the things Giuliani writes, you have to believe that money really does grow on trees, don’t you?

    He fails to discuss – if he even knows or cares about – the effect on the states, and what the states will have to do to raise revenue. We’ve already seen this with estate tax reform and the elimination of the state death tax credit that used to go right into the state treasury.

    He also leaves out the part where he plans to not replace government employees when they leave or retire, so we will have fewer employees making do with less money. Anyone who’s ever worked somewhere where, as people leave, their work is just divvied up among those who remain knows that this is a bad plan.

    We’ve been over this before; no one likes paying taxes, but everyone wants safe food and drugs and toys, wants good schools, sound infrastructure, well-staffed police and fire departments, etc. That stuff doesn’t pay for itself.

    Under a Giuilani plan, the government at all levels just gets worse and worse, less and less effective, and the quality of American life declines dramatically. I’m not saying there’s no waste in government – and the Bush administration certainly knows a lot about abuse and fraud – but throwing the baby out with the bathwater is not the way to fix things.

    Did he talk about how his company was one of those lobbying for some of that pork he claims to find so reprehensible?

    Didn’t think so.

    This man gives new meaning to the word “chutzpah.”

  • Pingback: Giuliani Campaiging Blocked by Paul Fanatics and WSJ Firewall - Liberal Values - Defending Liberty and Enlightened Thought

  • Ironically, the more Huckabee rises, the more it may end up helping Giuliani. Huckabee scares fiscal cons and libertarians to death. He’s the ultimate anti-libertarian Republican being fiscally populist/socially conservative.

    As more and more libertarians and fiscal cons see Huckabee rising they’re more inclined to unite behind Giuliani. Watch for some Ron Paul supporters to start peeling off in the coming weeks, and leaning towards Giuliani. Maybe even a few Libertarian Party members coming on board for “Libertarians for Giuliani.”

  • Bombshell!!!

    Giuliani just got the tacit backing of Grover Norquist, President of Americans for Tax Reform. Norquist praises Giuliani as the best on taxes.

  • Eric, why would Ron Paul supporters back an anti-2nd-amendment, scaremongering, overbearing surveillance state lover who supports yet more pointless wars?

    Dude, you might as well just vote for Hillary. She’s just as “libertarian” as Guliani — which is to say, not at all.

    • Comments are closed.