President Ghouliani, 3 & 4
Posted by: Not The Only One in Jokes, Rudy Ghouliani, Government Corruption, 2008 Presidential Race, Economics, Government InterferenceFor those who have read my previous post regarding Presidential candidate Rudy Ghouliani’s 12 Commitments, I will continue to critique the next two of his commitments.
As I said before the length of my critiques are the reason this subject has been broken up into several posts over a period of time.
3. I will restore fiscal discipline and cut wasteful Washington spending.
Click on this sentence on Ghouliani’s web site and it will feature the following quote: “This is what I did in
This first quote, which according to his own web site was stated in June of this year to an audience in New Hampshire, is an outright lie. As I have often mentioned before, New York City was home to a corrupt, inefficient public school system for three decades. The two previous Mayors before Rudy did absolutely nothing to streamline inefficiencies or seek private partnerships, both of which would have allowed the school system to reduce its costs.
Just like his predecessors, Ghouliani did absolutely nothing to restore any sort of fiscal discipline to the Board of Education, the largest public school system in the United States and between the 70s and 90s, one of the city’s most bloated bureaucracies. Instead, as more kids dropped out of school during his term as Mayor, Rudy’s solution to the problem was to allocate more funds to the NYPD so these children could more easily be arrested. He even proposed putting armed police officers in elementary, junior high and high schools, a move which was quickly shot down by the City Council. So here we have someone who is attacking a problem based on hindsight instead of foresight. And it doesn’t take a genius to figure out which approach, on average, is more expensive.It was in fact New York’s current Mayor, Mike Bloomberg, who restored fiscal discipline as well as accountability to this bloated bureaucracy. He completely abolished the Board of Ed and its corrupt, inefficient manner of operating, established a Department of Education that was more efficient (did more with less money) and in 2002 launched the Fund for Public Schools, a tax-deductible nonprofit organization dedicated to facilitating partnerships between the City’s schools and corporations. This group interacts with the DOE’s Office of Strategic Partnerships (something that didn’t exist in the old Board of Ed) and channels funding for specific educational programs (i.e., mentoring, after school programs, etc.) as well as allowing corporate sponsors to “adopt” entire schools. To me this is a perfect example of restoring fiscal discipline to a city agency. Problem is, Ghouliani had nothing to do with it.In fact, the only agency I know of Ghouliani cutting costs in while serving as Mayor was with the City’s Fire Department. According to the Uniformed Firefighters Association of Greater New York, he may have saved the city lots of money by purchasing second-hand two-way radios which led to the miscommunication and the death of hundreds of firefighters on 9/11 who never heard the warning to exit the burning World Trade Center.
As for his goal to cut wasteful Washington spending, I cannot think of a bigger waste of Washington spending than on the Iraq invasion, something Ghouliani feels is a good idea. Also, his second commitment to build a formidable fence along 7,400 miles of border between the U.S. and its neighbors to the south and north. But at the same time he acknowledges that about 45 percent of all illegal aliens in the U.S. cross our borders legally and then do not leave when their visas expire. Sounds like building such a long fence would be labeled as wasteful Washington spending. If Rudy had half a brain, he’d realize that what attracts illegal aliens to the U.S. is not a desire to violate federal law but rather to work in low-paying jobs. But instead of fining and incarcerating the people who employ these illegal workers, which would be less expensive and would actually bring in revenue, he wants to build a fence and expand the Border Patrol to better harass all the undocumented brown people, a far more costly initiative and a fine example of wasteful Washington spending.
Ghouliani does have some good ideas for fiscal reform such as cutting out anonymous earmarks in Congressional bills allocating tax dollars to something no one can easily identify, requiring cost estimates for all legislation before it is voted upon, and making the federal government adopt generally accepted accounting principles, something that is universal in the private sector. But his commitment to the War on Terror and the War on Brown People make me feel he wouldn’t know wasteful Washington spending if it bit him on the ass.
Furthermore, I feel our national debt is out of control. It is in the trillions of dollars, and Chinese banks are buying up a large chunk of our debt which will negatively affect the value of the U.S. dollar. Anyone who is serious about restoring fiscal discipline should talk about reducing our national debt and working towards a balanced national budget, and I did not see Rudy address this matter.
4. I will cut taxes and reform the tax code.
This is the part where even I have to agree with Rudy. Cutting out such things as the Death Tax (a.k.a. the Estate Tax), lowering corporate taxes and expanding tax-free savings accounts are great ideas. But how the hell is Ghouliani going to be able to lower federal taxes and still wage a War on Terror and his 7,400-mile long border fence? He’s going to have to give up one or the other. As for reforming the tax code, I am a supporter of a flat tax code for federal income taxes in which everyone pays a fixed percentage of their income and no tax credits, write-offs or other loopholes would exist to complicate the process. I also support the Fair Tax, a concept which would eliminate all federal income taxes and instead establish a national sales tax. Taxation of such services as telephone, electricity, water and gas would also be eliminated, at least on the federal level. Anyone who is serious about reforming the federal tax code would support either the flat tax or the Fair Tax, and I have not seen Rudy mention either, much less show any kind of support.
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