Giuliani Flip-Flop-Flips on Flat Tax

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Rudy Giuliani is was one of the GOP’s strongest opponents to a flat tax. When Steve Forbes was running for president on the idea in 1996, Rudy “disparaged a flat tax in general and Mr. Forbes’s plan in particular,” according to the New York Times. Rudy said a flat tax “would really be a disaster.”

But what’s a disaster between presidential candidates? In exchange for Steve Forbes’ endorsement, Giuliani recently announced he was a big proponent of the flat tax. He said of a federal income tax, “maybe I’d suggest not doing it at all, but if we were going to do it, a flat tax would make a lot of sense.”

Okay, so that’s a flip-flop. Care to reverse your position again, and make it a flip-flop-flip?

[When asked how he could support a flat tax after long opposition, Giuliani said,] “I didn’t favor it, I said something academic… What I said was, and it was not a joke, but it was half-jocular, was if we didn’t have an income tax…what would I favor? First I would favor no tax. That would be my first position. My second position would probably be a flat tax.”

But, he said, the tax “would probably not be feasible.”

I love this attitude. Can you imagine him as president? “Oh, did I say we should bomb Iran? I was kidding. But kidding on the square. I was, like, half kidding. Oh, Ahmadinejad launch an attack on Israel as a response? Crap. You’re kidding, right?”

The problem with Giuliani, and maybe this is a good problem, is that he isn’t comfortable flip-flopping. McCain panders to people he once despised and Romney has reversed his entire playbook on social issues — and both are sticking to their reversals, no matter how shameless or false they appear, and no matter how hard they get hammered for it. Giuliani, on the other hand, seems uncomfortable abandoning positions he has long held, and after he abandons them, he claims them back, or gets hopelessly muddled.

Maybe that’s to his credit.

More on this at Bruce Reed’s space on Slate. Also, Cameron blogged about the flat tax and Giuliani’s relationship to the crooked Bernard Kerik in an earlier post titled “Giuliani Meltdown.”

Fact:

Mother Jones was founded as a nonprofit in 1976 because we knew corporations and billionaires wouldn't fund the type of hard-hitting journalism we set out to do.

Today, reader support makes up about two-thirds of our budget, allows us to dig deep on stories that matter, and lets us keep our reporting free for everyone. If you value what you get from Mother Jones, please join us with a tax-deductible donation today so we can keep on doing the type of journalism 2022 demands.

payment methods

Fact:

Today, reader support makes up about two-thirds of our budget, allows us to dig deep on stories that matter, and lets us keep our reporting free for everyone. If you value what you get from Mother Jones, please join us with a tax-deductible donation today so we can keep on doing the type of journalism 2022 demands.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate