Say Anything Blog

I’m not a big supporter of Rudy Giuliani.  It has to do with his prosecution of so-called “junk bond king” Michael Milken, when Rudy was a US Attorney in NY.  But I have to admit that on terrorism and the nation’s economic and tax policies, two of the three most important issues in my view, Rudy has it exactly right.

Here’s Giuliani on taxes and the sub-prime mortgage “crisis” from a recent interview with US News and World Report:

Right now the president should be watching it very, very carefully, but what he should really be watching carefully is not only what’s happening in the housing market but the fundamentals of the American economy and making sure they’re all there and operating correctly. This would be a great time, if you wanted to stimulate the entire market, for Congress to agree to make the tax cuts permanent. You’d send a ripple effect of confidence through our markets that would be better than any bailout you could do for anybody. That would be bailing people out through strengthening the American economic system rather than weakening it.

And here’s his take on the current requirement that tax cuts must be “paid for” with cuts in federal expenditures:

I never ran out of budget cuts when I was mayor of New York City. ... A budget of that size [of the federal government], you can find budget cuts everywhere in the budget… I’ll give you one big one—42 percent of the federal workforce is coming up for retirement from now until 10 years from now, which would effectively be at the end of the next president’s term, if the president has two terms. You could not rehire half of them, and that would save you between $20 [billion] to $25 billion. It’s a good start, and it would also be a good discipline because we would get all these agencies to do what businesses have done. It would get all these agencies to do more with less and take advantage of new technologies.

My objection to Giuliani may be short-sighted and even petty, though it is shared by economist Don Luskin for one.  But I will certainly give the man his due.  He understands the economy and the economically philosophically sound reasons for lowering taxes.

Read the whole thing.