Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani says he has “the best record” of any Republican considering a run for the presidency in 2012 because he turned around his city’s moribund economy.
On CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday morning, Giuliani also said “America shouldn’t default” and the bipartisan debate about
whether to raise the debt ceiling “is too big an issue to play chicken with.”
“I sympathize with the people who say [Treasury Secretary Timothy] Geithner may be exaggerating, but I sure as heck don’t want to test that,” Giuliani said.
He opposes raising taxes and said such a compromise would result in “political suicide” for members of Congress.
“In order to get somebody to compromise, you’ve got to figure out how to get them to do something that isn’t going to commit suicide,” he said. “If they have to agree to a tax increase, they are committing political suicide. You don’t ask someone to shoot themselves.”
Giuliani said he will decide whether to run for president at the end of the summer.
“I think that I probably have the best record in terms of having done something similar to what the country needs right now,” he said.
Giuliani, mayor from 1994 to 2001, boasted of lowering his city’s unemployment rate to 5 percent, down from 10 percent; reducing the number of residents on welfare by more than half; and turning a $2.3 billion deficit into a $3 billion surplus.
“That’s what the country needs right now,” he said. “President Obama has presided over the longest string of very high unemployment since the Great Depression and hasn’t done much about it.”
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