(Via Steve Benen at The Carpetbagger Report)
The Serial Exaggerator strikes again
One of the principal flaws in Rudy Giuliani’s presidential campaign is that he’s running, counter intuitively, on a platform based on subjects he knows nothing about — foreign policy and national security.
But just as importantly, Giuliani keeps undermining his own credibility on all policy issues by exaggerating to the point of comedy. He can’t just say he spent time at Ground Zero; he has to exaggerate to say he spent as much time (if not more) than the rescue, recovery, and cleanup workers who spent a year sifting through human remains and rubble. He can’t just say he’s interested in counter-terrorism; he has to exaggerate to say he’s been “studying Islamic terrorism for 30 years.” He can’t just say he’s committed to promoting adoption over abortion; he has to exaggerate his record as mayor. He can’t just he cut taxes in NYC; he has to exaggerate his record to include tax cuts he opposed (he even counted one cut twice). The guy can’t even release a list of congressional endorsements without exaggerating the numbers.
When it comes to Giuliani’s record on budget surpluses, it’s more of the same.
Rudolph W. Giuliani has been broadcasting radio advertisements in Iowa and other states far from the city he once led stating that as mayor of New York, he “turned a $2.3 billion deficit into a multibillion dollar surplus.”
The assertion, which Mr. Giuliani has repeated on the trail as he has promoted his fiscal conservatism, is somewhat misleading, independent fiscal monitors said. In fact, Mr. Giuliani left his successor, Michael R. Bloomberg, with a bigger deficit than the one Mr. Giuliani had to deal with when he arrived in 1994. And that deficit would have been large even if the city had not been attacked on Sept. 11, 2001.
“He inherited a gap, and he left a gap for his successor,” Ronnie Lowenstein, the director of the city’s Independent Budget Office, a nonpartisan agency that monitors the city budget, said of Mr. Giuliani. “The city was budgeting as though the good times were not going to end, but sooner or later they always do.”
In an amusing response, the Giuliani campaign told the NYT that the former mayor’s claims are technically true because he claims to have created a surplus, not that he was able to maintain one.
Reporters labeled Al Gore a “serial exaggerator” in 2000 on a whole lot less than this.
Mr. Giuliani’s eight years of fiscal stewardship of the city was initially marked by a new brand of conservative budgeting principles in which he cut spending, cut taxes and cut the payroll. Later, when the booming stock market of the late 1990s pumped revenues into the city’s coffers, Mr. Giuliani was able to cut taxes, increase spending above the rate of inflation, and still post big surpluses.
But the economy cooled near the end of Mr. Giuliani’s second term, and he spent most of the roughly $3 billion surplus he had accumulated to balance his final budget, for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2002. Even before the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Giuliani projected that his successor would face a $2.8 billion gap the next year. After the attacks, that gap climbed to $4.8 billion in a $42.3 billion budget.
Faced with such a huge deficit, which continued to grow as the economic aftershocks of the attacks continued and the costs of some of the Giuliani administration’s policies came due, the next mayor, Mr. Bloomberg, was forced to take the extraordinary steps of borrowing to pay for operating expenses, cutting programs, and raising property taxes by 18.5 percent to balance the budget.
Giuliani has to know someone is going to check on his claims, but he seems to be unable to help himself.
His record just isn’t good enough to stand on its own, so we’re forced to see one exaggeration after another. The media hasn’t noticed yet, but this pattern is bound to catch up with him eventually.
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