Moreover, Giuliani’s policing success was a boon to minority neighborhoods. For instance, in the city’s 34th Precinct, covering the largely Hispanic Washington Heights section of Manhattan, murders dropped from 76 in 1993, Dinkins’s last year, to only seven by Giuliani’s last year, a decline of more than 90 percent. Far from being the racist that activists claimed, Giuliani had delivered to the city’s minority neighborhoods a true form of equal protection under the law.
Giuliani’s success against crime wasn’t merely the singular achievement of a former prosecutor. He applied the same principles to social and economic policy, with equally impressive results. Long before President Bush’s “ownership” society, Giuliani described his intention to restore New York as the “entrepreneurial city,” not merely providing the climate for new job creation but also reshaping government social policy away from encouraging dependency and toward reinforcing independence.
New York had gone in the opposite direction starting in the mid-1960s, when Lindsay had drastically increased welfare rolls, believing many of the poor too disadvantaged ever to succeed and thus needing to be permanently on the dole. The Gotham welfare bureaucracy saw signing people up as its goal, while an entire industry of nonprofit organizations and advocacy groups arose to cater to and contract with the city’s vast welfare system. Budget documents from the Dinkins years projected an eventual 1.6 million people on welfare. “The City of New York was actually quite successful in achieving what it wanted to achieve, which was to encourage the maximum number of people to be on welfare,” Giuliani later explained. “If you ran a welfare office, . . . you had a bigger budget, and you had more authority, if you had more people on welfare.”
Giuliani decided to launch a welfare revolution, moving recipients from the dole to a job. Mindful that for years the city’s welfare bureaucracy had focused on signing up new recipients (Lindsay’s welfare chief had been nicknamed “Come And Get It” Ginsberg), the Giuliani administration first set out to recertify everyone in the city’s own home-relief program to eliminate fraud. In less than a year, the rolls of the program (for able-bodied adults not eligible for federal welfare programs) declined by 20 percent, as the city discovered tens of thousands of recipients who were actually employed, living outside the city, or providing false Social Security numbers.
Giuliani then instituted a work requirement for the remaining home-relief recipients, mostly men, obliging them to earn their checks by cleaning city parks and streets or doing clerical work in municipal offices for 20 hours a week. Welfare advocates vigorously objected, and one advocate pronounced the workfare program “slavery.” The New York Times editorialized that most people on home relief were incapable of work.
Giuliani persisted, and when Congress finally passed welfare reform in 1996, giving states and cities broad powers to refocus the giant, federally funded welfare program for mothers and children, Giuliani applied many of the same kinds of reforms. He hired as welfare commissioner Jason Turner, the architect of welfare reform in Wisconsin, which had led the nation in putting welfare recipients back to work. Turner promptly converted the city’s grim welfare intake offices into cheerful and optimistic job centers, where counselors advised welfare recipients on how to write a resumé and provided them with skills assessment and a space they could use to look for work.
By 1999, the number of welfare recipients finding work had risen to more than 100,000 annually, and the welfare rolls had dropped by more than 600,000. It took steadfast courage to win those gains. “The pressure on Rudy during these years was enormous,” says Richard Schwartz, a Giuliani policy advisor. “The advocates and the press trained their sights on us, just waiting for something to go wrong in these workfare programs.”
As part of Giuliani’s quintessentially conservative belief that dysfunctional behavior, not our economic system, lay at the heart of intergenerational poverty, he also spoke out against illegitimacy and the rise of fatherless families. A child born out of wedlock, he observed in one speech, was three times more likely to wind up on welfare than a child from a two-parent family. “Seventy percent of long-term prisoners and 75 percent of adolescents charged with murder grew up without fathers,” Giuliani told the city. He insisted that the city and the nation had to reestablish the “responsibility that accompanies bringing a child into the world,” and to that end he required deadbeat fathers either to find a private-sector job or to work in the city’s workfare program as a way of contributing to their child’s upbringing. But he added that changing society’s attitude toward marriage was more important than anything government could do: “[I]f you wanted a social program that would really save these kids, . . . I guess the social program would be called fatherhood.”
BWWWWWWWWWWWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I LOVE FRIDAY!
He is NOT a conservative. He is on the wrong side of these conservative issues:
Abortion
Embryonic Stem Cell Research
Partial Birth Abortion
Global Warming
Gun Control
Homosexual "civil unions"
etc.
Thanks for posting this!
I think I may have read this mess someplace before.
Really?!?
All true. I worked in New York all through those years, and he was a great mayor.
He would also be a great president. He is strong, fearless, honest. He confronted the liberal New York press and beat them at their own game.
BUT. I simply cannot support him unless he repents on the issue of abortion. Baby killing is not an option. And whether or not I vote for him, he will turn off millions of conservative voters unless he comes around on this issue.
I must say, I would rather have Giuliani than Romney. I trust him more to do the job. He is more honest. But he needs to make a deal on abortion.
I sense a fog-making machine in operation. Maybe he is a conservative (haven't delved into this yet) but the very length of this article indicates: 1) a newbie who hasn't figured out today's long-standing rule of conciseness, or 2) a calculator trying to pick up newbies who do not know the rule.
I guess I just don't understand what a conservative is anymore. Somehow the definitions have changed, and "electable" carries more weight than ideology.
Tough times call for Tough Men. And Rudy is the ONLY ONE running who fits that bill.
Well done. Get ready for the whiners to arrive en masse.
LBT
-=-=-
Earth to Steven:
Giuliani is RINO of the first order, my Democrat mom is more conservative than him.
OK. I am completely and totally mystified. I have no idea who "Steven Malanga" is so I am left guessing as to why Giuliani is a conservative counterpart of same. Not to mention why I should support him for being such.
Who is "Steven Malanga" and what are his (positions on the) issues?
Giuliani will ensure Hitlerys election..
Yes, we have a REAL conservative, don't we.
How stupid does the writer of this drivel think we are?
Rudy is probably somewhere between Hillary and Al Gore. To the right of Hillary and to the left of Al Gore....
And I'm Sheik Yerbouti from Qatar.
Its always good to hear conservative principles.
The real question is "is he conservative ENOUGH?" I think on law and order issues, fiscal responsibility, and the war on terror, he is likely to be even more conservative than Bush. I think he will appoint tough law and order judges, in spite of the sliming he has been getting in that regard. Certainly, a lot of true conservatives will have to swallow hard to support him. In the end, I sincerely hope the 2006 wake-up call will persuade enough social conservatives to accept him as a compromise before we all become dinosaurs.
Thanks very much for posting this. It was very informative.