Between January 1, 1994 and January 1, 2002, Giuliani famously supervised a 57-percent overall drop in crime and a 65-percent plunge in homicides.
Giuliani curbed or killed 23 taxes totaling $8 billion. He slashed Gotham's top income-tax rate 21 percent and local taxes' share of personal income 15.9 percent. Giuliani called hiking taxes after September 11 "a dumb, stupid, idiotic, and moronic thing to do."
Giuliani's spending increases averaged just 2.9 percent annually. His fiscal 1995 and 2002 budgets actually decreased total outlays.
While hiring 12 percent more cops and 12.8 percent more teachers, Giuliani sliced manpower 17.2 percent, from 117,494 workers to 97,338.
Rather than "perpetuate discrimination," Giuliani junked Gotham's 20 percent set-asides for female and minority contractors.
Two years before federal welfare reform, Giuliani began shrinking public-assistance rolls from 1,112,490 recipients in 1993 to 462,595 in 2001, a 58.4-percent decrease to 1966 levels. He also renamed welfare offices "Job Centers." According to Giuliani's book, Leadership, in fiscal 2001, City Hall placed 151,376 welfare beneficiaries, a 16-fold increase over 1993's 9,215 assignments under Democrat David Dinkins.
Foster-care residents dropped from 42,000 to 28,700 between 1996 and 2001, while adoptions zoomed 65 percent to 21,189.
Giuliani privatized 69.8 percent of city-owned apartments; sold WNYC-TV, WNYC-FM, WNYC-AM, and Gotham's share of the U.N. Plaza Hotel; and invited the private Central Park Conservancy to manage Manhattan's 843-acre rectangular garden.
Giuliani advocated school vouchers, launched a Charter School Fund, and scrapped tenure for principals.
While many libertarians frowned, Giuliani padlocked porn shops in Times Square, paving the way for smut-free cineplexes and Disney musicals.
Giuliani barnstorms for conservative candidates. Last fall, he addressed 38 post-convention Bush-Cheney rallies and stumped for Senator Johnny Isakson (R., Ga.), Senator Mel Martinez (R., Fla.), gubernatorial hopeful Dino Rossi (R., Wash.), Rep. Pete Sessions (R., Tex.), and Senator John Thune (R., S. D.), the man who toppled Tom Daschle. "We also taped get-out-the-vote phone messages for 20 candidates," one Giuliani aide recalls. This February, Giuliani spoke at a fundraiser for Senator Jon Kyl (R., Ariz.).
Sounds pretty good to me! All of this and he is one of the few politicians that was able to show truly great leadership in the face of a national disaster.
The religious right hates this guy, even better!!
