Sunday, July 29th 2007, 8:33 PM
It is Rudy Giuliani’s favorite boast on the presidential campaign trail: “I cut taxes 23 times” as mayor of New York, he says, a claim inevitably met by applause.
The impressive-sounding stat stars in radio ads this week in New Hampshire and Iowa, where the voiceover asserts that Giuliani “cut or eliminated 23 taxes.”
Trouble is, it’s not really true, say tax-cutting allies of the former mayor, as well as experts at the Citizens Budget Commission and elsewhere.
A close examination of the tax-slashing claims from a list provided by his campaign show that in at least four cases, the former mayor is seizing credit for cuts initiated by others and, in one case, for a tax reduction he fought.
And some of the cuts’ original champions are now calling him on it.
“The correct nomenclature would be ‘We cut taxes,’ not ‘I cut taxes,’” said former City Council Speaker Peter Vallone, a Democrat who maintained cordial relations with Republican Giuliani.
It’s not that Giuliani wasn’t a persistent tax-cutter. He was, says Vallone and many others. But that just makes his decision to fudge numbers seem needless, they add.
Vallone’s slap is aimed mainly at Giuliani’s decision to count among his 23 cuts the elimination of a 12.5% personal income tax surcharge in 1998 - a $192 million idea that Vallone brought to the table that year.
At the time, Vallone was running for governor. Giuliani and his aides spent months blasting the cut as an irresponsible gambit. MORE
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