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Responding to the Thompson invitation to go down memory lane the Rudy Team is putting out a detailed list of what he was up to as Mayor in the 90's. The headings include: Cutting Taxes(23 times in $9B in savings), Reducing Welfare Rolls(640,000 people removed from rolls for 58.37% reduction), Cutting The Bureaucracy(20% reduction in city workforce and city budget went from $2.3B deficit to $2.9B surplus), Dramatically Reducing Crime(56% reduction overall and 66% drop in murders) and To Make NY Safe for Families( getting addicts and beggars off the street and throwing out porn shops for example). What first struck me about this is -- Good grief, I'd forgotten what a hell hole NY City had become. (Cutting 640,000 from the welfare rolls makes you wonder what the ratio of working to nonworking people was and cutting $9B in taxes boggles the mind when you consider how much revenue prior regimes had to work with.) But more immediately, I think both directed at Thompson and with Romney we're going to enter the "comparative" ad and campaign season for Rudy. The crime figures on Romney's Massachusetts were a gift but I imagine Rudy's folks will start talking about the "fees" and "close tax loopholes" in the Romney record. The latter issue is going to be key in New Hampshire--home of no state income tax.

topics:
Taxes