Again. There is nothing conservative about Rooty. Which is why FRee Republic rejected his run for POTUS from the get-go. That should tell you all you need to know.
Not only is Rooty a social liberal, he's a fiscal liberal. Rooty is no more conservative than Joe Lieberman. Both support a strong defense. So did LBJ and FDR. BFD!
Now pay attention. You just may learn something.
The Real Rudy Record
From the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research (Edmund J. McMahon):
"Even with the tax cuts of the last several years, New York remains by far the most heavily taxed big city in the country."
TAXES: From 1996-2001 Giuliani and the City Council agreed to reduce marginal city income taxes by some $2.0-billion, an effort that offset the $1.8-billion tax increase put in place by Mayor Dinkins a few years earlier. So in reality, individual city income taxes were actually cut by a modest $200-million. Giuliani made no effort to make permanent changes to the city income tax code. Giuliani even fought efforts to abolish a 12.5% tax surcharge. The primary reason Rudy and the City Council agreed to cut business taxes, was to make NYCity more appealing to companies thinking about locating/relocating to the Big Apple. A smart move, however, when Rudy left office he left NYCity straddled with some of the highest income, sales, property and general corporation taxes in the entire nation.
GOVERNMENT SPENDING: Spending under Rudy`s reign as Mayor went up 35.6%, compared to the inflation rate of 22.2%. Rudy left NYCity with a projected, pre-9/11 deficit of $2.0 billion and an increased debt total topping $42-billion. Second largest debt after the federal government. Giuliani also added 15,000 new teachers to the city employment rolls. Increasing the membership of two major liberal organizations, the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT).
"The scope of government was not reduced at all. The mayor abandoned his most visible initiative in this sphere—the proposed sale of the city hospital system—after a struggle with the unions and defeats in the courts. He did cut costs in social services; even before the new federal welfare reforms took effect in 1997, the city had begun to significantly reduce caseloads. But money saved on social services has only helped to subsidize big increases in other categories. Today the array of social services sponsored and partially funded by the city—from day care to virtually guaranteed housing—is as wide as ever.
"In the final analysis, Mayor Giuliani sought to make the city deliver services more efficiently—not to make the city deliver fewer services. Gains in efficiency were offset, however, by a spike in the costs of outsourced contracts (see point 2 below). Thus, in two areas where inroads might have been made, the city instead failed to reduce spending."
"1. Personnel Increases. In 1995–96, the city entered into a series of collective bargaining agreements with its public-employee unions. In addition to granting pay increases that ended up roughly equaling inflation, the city promised not to lay off any workers for the life of the contracts. These agreements were expected to add $2.2 billion to the budget by fiscal 2001. But that estimate didn’t reckon with renewed growth in the number of city employees. After dipping in Giuliani’s first two years, the full-time headcount rose from 235,069, in June 1996 to over 253,000 by November 2000. Thanks largely to this growth in the workforce, the total increase in personnel service costs since 1995 has been $4 billion.
2. "Outsourced Services. The failure to shrink the scope of city government made it all the more imperative that Mayor Giuliani vastly increase its efficiency. In the attempt to increase productivity, the mayor farmed out some city services to private contractors. But as the number of outsourced contracts doubled under Giuliani, contractual expenses also nearly doubled—from $3 billion to $5.8 billion. While it may be argued that the city saved money by outsourcing these services, the net savings turned out to be marginal at best. In practice, outsourcing proved to be more of a bargaining chip in negotiations with unions than a serious means of pruning expenses."
Hard evidence that Rudy Giuliani was NO fiscal conservative. Another run-of-the-mill NY City liberal ---AKA. "Rockefeller Republican".
BEEP BEEP BEEP
That’s the sound of the cherry picker backing up as it attempts to access more “facts” in support of a unsustainable premise.
Rudy is a conservative. He was the best candidate in the GOP field. The myopic pseudo-cons are patting themselves on their backs because they ensured his loss, yet they straddled the country with BHO. Nice job, PCs.
And FR is not the barometer of conservatism.