Posted on 11/16/2007 5:31:11 AM PST by calcowgirl
As a presidential candidate, Rudy Giuliani recounts his eight-year stint as mayor of New York City as an era of tax-cutting and welfare-slashing, one long fight to tame the city's bureaucratic behemoth. That's basically true, but Giuliani and his campaign exaggerate some facts and ignore many others to hone the point.
Giuliani often suggests that he alone was responsible for cutting 23 taxes, but seven of those moves were state initiatives, according to the city's Independent Budget Office. Of the remaining 16 tax reductions, Giuliani actually opposed the largest cut, which was due to come with the expiration of a 12 1/2-percent surcharge on the city's personal income tax. Giuliani proposed extending the levy, generator of several hundred million tax dollars a year, but backed down in a clash with the City Council and the tax relief took effect.
Moreover, Giuliani had a large blind spot in his Republican tax-cutting orthodoxy - publicly subsidized stadiums for professional sports teams.
In 1998, he did an about-face on his plan to phase out the nation's only tax on commercial rent and proposed an extension of it to provide almost $600 million to subsidize construction of new stadiums for New York's Major League Baseball teams, the Yankees and Mets. A year later he proposed building a publicly assisted $1 billion domed stadium on Manhattan's West Side to lure back the Jets football team from New Jersey, but did not spell out the amount or source of the city's contribution.
Under Giuliani, the city built ballparks in Staten Island and Coney Island for minor-league affiliates of the Yankees and Mets - at a total cost of about $110 million, the Independent Budget Office calculated.
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
It's what we've come to EXPECT from this egotistical, arrogant, Narcissistic, authoritarian, northeastern-corridor, Bluest-of-Blue, big-city LIBERAL RINO.
Rudy would be a problem for a ton of us too. A pro-gay, pro-abort, pro-illegal, and anti-gun president with a sordid personal life and connections to some real scum? i don’t care what party he comes from, thats far from ideal. I don’t want to have to vote for Hilary-lite. Rudy does look better in a dress though.
Shallow and insignificant is a perfect description of Giuliani’s mythical legacy.
Rudy is a problem—for America. Hopefully he will never hold another public office.
Those aren’t his only exaggerated claims about his record.
Giuliani and his shills love to claim that reversed the raising crime rate in NYC. As with so much of the Giuliani myth, the truth is that perception is more a matter of spin than fact.
In 1990, William Bratton was appointed Chief of Police of the New York City Transit Police by Mayor Dinkins. He significantly brought down crime in the subways which earned him an offer from the city of Boston to become Superintendent in Chief of the Boston Police Department.
In 1994 George Kelling, the social scientist from whom Giuliani got the “broken windows” theory of crime reduction, pushed Giuliani to hire Bratton as New York City’s Police Commissioner. Unlike Giuliani and his shills, Mr. Bratton readily acknowledges the fact that crime was already falling under Mr. Dinkins and his Police Commissioner, Ray Kelly. What hadn’t been turned around, he admits, were the quality-of-life offenses “that reminded people of crime,” from the squeegee men who flocked to crowded intersections to the aggressive begging that could be seen on the streets and in the subways.
Mr. Bratton also admits that the majority of the new cops Giuliani takes credit for putting on the streets of New York were authorized to be hired under the “Safe Streets, Safe City” program approved in Mayor Dinkins’s tenure but had not actually made it to the streets until Mr. Giuliani took office.
It’s also important to know that crime declined in virtually every city in the country during the 1990s, and that New York mirrored that national trend and only out performed the rest of the country because of the greater influx of cops than in other localities.
The NYPD Chief Who Did His Job Too Well
Time, Thursday, Nov. 15, 2007
A former Boston police chief, Bratton decentralized the stovepiped NYPD, put more cops on the street and did block-by-block crime analysis, deploying patrols to hot spots. By the end of his first year, crime had declined by 12%; in 1995, it fell 17% more. But as crime dropped, the mayor and the chief began to rumble. Bratton believed that an aggressive p.r. strategy would act as a booster rocket for the revolution under way in the police department. But Giuliani saw him as a credit-hogging media hound. The situation quickly turned ugly. Giuliani's deputies took over Bratton's press operation and eventually fired half the staff. City Hall began whispering to reporters about Bratton's heavy travel schedule. And Giuliani tried to put the brakes on a $350,000 Bratton book deal. By the time Bratton appeared on the cover of TIME in January 1996, the love was gone. Bratton announced his resignation two months later.
My dog would look better in a dress.
Giuliani for dogcatcher bump!
One sign of his effectiveness then was the blind hatred directed at him from every quadrant in the City. When you enrage that many Democrats and you are a Rep then you know you are doing something right.
.”... Seriously, you would have to have been their to understand this.”
I still live in NYC and see the difference. Bloomberg let a lot of little things that Guiliani did go by the wayside. Garbage is making its way back to the streets and the smell urine is wafting up from the subways again. I loved Rudy as mayor but I have my doubts if he would make a good President. As for his 9/11 legacy, I passed by City Hall every morning before 8 a.m. and his car was rolling up. He may not have been a hero, but he was the face of constancy and some sort of comfort when New York City needed it most.
Yep! Slowly the truth about Giuliani is starting to get out.
After Giuliani got rid of Mr. Bratton because he was getting the credit for reducing crime, Rudy ordered his replacement to more than triple the size of the Street Crime Unit which had proven effective in taking guns off the street during Mr. Bratton’s tenure, despite the warning of the unit’s commander that such an expansion meant that SCU members would no longer be as carefully selected and trained. This overreaching came home to roost with the fatal shooting of Amadou Diallo, a Bronx man who was mistaken for a rape suspect by four SCU cops who were working their first tour of duty together and doing it without a supervisor present.
That tragic shooting was the product of both bad police work and the foolhardy decision by Rudy and the top brass in the NYPD to relax the supervision of the SCU in order to expand it. It created a major political problem for Giuliani, who sank into demagoguery as his Police Department and his dealings with the minority community came under fire.
Bloomberg is coasting, toast, doesn't have the fight in him.
That is leadership. That and standing solidly for what you really believe, despite all the many naysayers, the incessant and never ending lib media barrage and all the pooling that would have turned a Democrat in a weeks time.
Whatever you say about this president, he is by any measure a leader. Does Rudy measure up to this standard. I don’t know and while he is not my choice I would rather him be president then any of the cut and run losers on the other side.
“One sign of his effectiveness then was the blind hatred directed at him from every quadrant in the City.”
So true. At every rally, even a minute one, there was always an asshat carrying a placard of Guiliani as Hitler. My favorite one was the rumour that NYC Police Officers on horseback kept black voters from getting to the polls. Again, I loved Rudy as mayor. As President...that’s a different story. But I will take him over Hillary.
That national economic boom made his fiscal policies (and tax cuts) much, MUCH easier. Let's tell the 'whole story' here, Rudy.
I can only imagine how devastating a shock this is going to come to you all. ;)
Everything you two are saying about Rudy is the same thing we have heard from Rudy Apologists for some time now.
It alwasys seems like a smoke-screen to cover the EXTREME LIBERALISM of the man and to obuscate what he is really all about. Rudy.
To say otherwise, is either ignorance or wanton fabrication.
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