For 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
New York City. I restored fiscal discipline …”
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. (more…)