Is Giuliani a Supply‐​Sider?

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Steve Forbes endorses Rudy Giuliani and makes a reasonably compelling argument that he believes in smaller government:

Rudy Giuliani…cut taxes and the size of government.… Mr. Giuliani delivered, overcoming the initial resistance of the overwhelmingly Democratic City Council. He ultimately prevailed 23 times, including cuts in sales, personal income, commercial rent and hotel occupancy taxes.


…Mr. Giuliani always made fiscal discipline a priority: instructing city commissioners to cut agency budgets even when the deficits had turned to surpluses. Mr. Giuliani set out to cut the size of city government, insisting that New York should live within its means. New Yorkers saw their quality of life improve with more effective delivery of services while the bureaucratic ranks were being thinned by nearly 20,000 — a near 20% decrease in city headcount, excluding police officers and teachers.

But there are reasons to question Giuliani’s pedigree. In a post on the New York Sun’s political blog, Ryan Sager quotes Giuliani trashing the flat tax:

“It [the flat tax] would really be a disaster and it’s totally inconsistent with the movement of the Republican Congress toward giving more responsibility to state and local government,” Mr. Giuliani said on CNN’s “Capital Gang,” on March 9, 1996.

To be sure, even good policymakers sometimes say silly things because of competing political interests. Nonetheless, it is difficult to reconcile Giuliani’s recent supply‐​side rhetoric with his harsh 1996 statement. If he had merely expressed concern, that would be understandable, but claiming that a flat tax would be a “disaster” suggests a genuine hostility to the flagship policy goal of supply‐​side economics.