The Year Of Clinton and Giuliani — How 1993 Helped Give Us The World of 2023: Part Two, 'It's the Economy...'

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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Now, part two of our six-part series, the year of Bill and Rudy, how 1993 helped set up the world of 2023. Bill Clinton became president in 1993 and Rudy Giuliani was elected mayor. Why did America move left and New York City move right and how did those choices help give us the world and the issues we're living with today?

For today's installment, we train our 30-year lens on the economy. The biggest things, Bill Clinton gave us NAFTA in 1993 and an income tax increase on people with the highest incomes. His initial claims for NAFTA were sky-high as it lifted tariffs on goods moving between the US, Mexico, and Canada. How sky-high? Well, here's President Clinton at the signing ceremony for the agreement in September 1993.

Bill Clinton: I believe that NAFTA will create 200,000 American jobs in the first two years of its effect. I believe if you look at the trends, and President Bush and I were talking about this morning, starting about the time he was elected president, over one-third of our economic growth and, in some years, over one-half of our net new jobs came directly from exports. On average, those export-related jobs played much higher wages than jobs that had no connection to exports. I believe that NAFTA will create a million jobs in the first five years of its impact. I believe that that is many more jobs than will be lost as inevitably some will be as always happens when you open up the mix to a new range of competition.

Brian Lehrer: We'll see how those predictions look 30 years later with economists and economic journalists Paul Krugman and Greg David in just a minute and how NAFTA helped give us Donald Trump and more. First, here's Clinton again after the tax hike that he got Congress to pass in 1993, touting it as progress in his State of the Union address the next year.

Bill Clinton: Because the deficit was so large and because they benefited from tax cuts in the 1980s, we did ask the wealthiest Americans to pay more to reduce the deficit. On April the 15th, the American people will discover the truth about what we did last year on taxes. Only the top one--

[applause]

Bill Clinton: Yes, listen.

[applause]

Bill Clinton: The top 1.2% of Americans, as I said all along, will pay higher income tax rates. Let me repeat.

[applause]

Bill Clinton: Only the wealthiest 1.2% of Americans will face higher income tax rates and no one else will, and that is the truth.

[applause]

Brian Lehrer: We heard Bill Clinton on NAFTA, Bill Clinton on taxes. We'll get to the Giuliani parts as we go, but spoiler alert on all of this. The economy boom for the rest of the decade nationwide and in New York, hence the phrase, "Party like it's 1999." Remember that? With us first, economist, CUNY professor, and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. He won a Nobel Prize for his work identifying patterns of international trade. His books include his most recent from 2020, Arguing With Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future. Dr. Krugman, always good to have you on. Welcome back to WNYC.

Dr. Paul Krugman: All right, good to be on.

Brian Lehrer: First, to the Bill Clinton clip on NAFTA and that initial prediction, at least for the rest of the 1990s, did NAFTA create a million US jobs in its first five years?

Dr. Paul Krugman: No, a lot of us, even those of us who thought NAFTA was a good idea, always thought that stuff was silly. There were a lot of reasons to do it. Creating jobs wasn't really one of them. As it turned out that predictions that NAFTA was going to create a lot of jobs were based on the view that there was going to be an economic boom in Mexico, that there were going to be lots of capital flowing to Mexico. What happened instead was that Mexico had a nasty financial crisis in 1995.

Actually, Mexico actually ended up buying quite a lot less from the United States for a while, so NAFTA wasn't a job creator, but other things were going very, very right for the economy. In fact, Clinton presided over an enormous jobs boom, which had very little to do with NAFTA. It's okay. Not many people were tracking the tailed numbers to say, "Well, things are great, but not for the reasons you said they'd be great," so it was okay.

Brian Lehrer: I actually want to reference an article that you wrote just a few years ago called What Economists (Including Me) Got Wrong About Globalization. I think part of your premise was that you didn't expect globalization to lead to something you call "hyper-globalization" or to hurt workers in the industrial Midwest as much as it did, but you tell me, how has your view on globalizing the economy as Clinton agreed to do with NAFTA and later with China changed or not changed over time?

Dr. Paul Krugman: Well, what we didn't realize, you can still make a case. Overall, globalization has been, if not, a big job creator. It's been roughly neutral. There's a lot of good things to say for it. What I didn't realize what I was saying in that article was that the negative impacts would tend to be very localized. Overall, if you ask how many jobs did we lose, first of all, China was a much, much bigger factor than Mexico always. How many jobs were displaced by Chinese imports relative to the size of the US economy?

Not that many relative to the size of the furniture industry in Hickory, North Carolina, which is one of the places that got really hard hit by Chinese imports. Well, it looked pretty big. We had a lot of communities, a relatively small part of the country as a whole, but particular communities that got hit really hard. That was something that I have to say, yes, I don't think even the critics of globalization were pointing to that, but it's turned out that that was the major unanticipated negative.

Brian Lehrer: It's humbling, right?

Dr. Paul Krugman: Yes. Look, the world's a complicated place. Once in a while, you discover sometimes for good, sometimes for evil. Sometimes you discover that you were missing something really important that you should have seen. Complicated reason. I, in particular, given some of my research focuses, I should have seen this coming, but I didn't. Nonetheless, people remember the Clinton years correctly as a time of economic boom. A lot of the negative stuff that people had to say about globalization came really during the 2000s, not during the 1990s.

Brian Lehrer: What about Clinton's tax hike? We played that clip of him touting that too. I was going to ask NAFTA and the tax increase together, but you're dismissing any positive effect or much positive effect of NAFTA. Did the tax increase, as you look back, contribute to the late '90s economic boom or was that also irrelevant?

Dr. Paul Krugman: No, the important point about the tax increase is what it didn't do. If you go back to the time, Republicans were saying it's going to create a depression, it's going to destroy the incentive to work, how horrible he's reversing Reagan, and it's all going to be back to the days of Jimmy Carter, which weren't as bad as-- Anyway, none of that happened. In fact, the economy boomed.

Now, the tax hike probably didn't cause the boom. Boom was probably mostly that businesses finally figured out what to do with computers. That led to a productivity boom and an investment boom, all of which Clinton had the good luck to preside over. The tax increase certainly didn't do any harm and it did raise revenue. It did reduce the deficit. On the whole, you'd have to say Clinton was vindicated, at least in thinking that hiking taxes on high-income people was a good idea.

Brian Lehrer: The federal government had balanced budgets for a few years there in the late '90s. We've borrowed massively per year ever since for the Iraq War, the Great Recession, the pandemic, the Bush and Trump tax cuts. This year's federal borrowing is over $1 trillion just for the one fiscal year. Did Clintonomics balance the budget or maybe Clintonomics plus a lot of pressure from Newt Gingrich and the Republican Congress?

Dr. Paul Krugman: No, it's pretty much Clintonomics. It was the tax hike plus a booming economy. I have to say, if there was a big mistake on the tax hike, it was not understanding that if a Democrat in the White House balances the budget, what that does is it sets up the stage for the next Republican president to blow it all on tax cuts. That's been the rhythm now repeatedly. I think Democrats have learned a lesson there that fiscal responsibility doesn't really pay, not so much because it's bad economics. It's because the other guys will just give it away again.

Brian Lehrer: Before we take a break and bring in Greg David and bring the New York angle into this in addition to you staying with us and continue to talk about the national angle, you do politics as well as economics. We were just talking about that a little bit with respect to the deficit. On NAFTA, Congress passed NAFTA with more Republican votes than Democratic votes in 1993. For one thing, that kind of aisle-crossing might be impossible today on maybe anything. If it passed with a coalition of a Democratic president and the Republicans in Congress mostly, whose interests were being satisfied and who did President Clinton cross?

Dr. Paul Krugman: A lot of it was actually foreign policy. If you actually go back to the debates of the time, Mexico was democratizing. Mexico was getting better. There are some problems there now. The Mexican government essentially had asked for this. You didn't want to say no. In a lot of ways, it was geopolitics rather than straight economics.

That same is true actually for the creation of the World Trade Organization, which was the next year, also under Clinton. Democratic presidents used to do that a lot right up through Barack Obama. At this point now, Democrats have again said, "Look, given the nature of our domestic opposition, we can't do that. We can't spend political capital trying to do stuff that's good for the world order if it's going to be politically costly."

Brian Lehrer: Yes, but looking back on Clinton's rise generally in that respect, it came after 12 years of Reagan and Bush in the White House. Democrats only came out of the desert to win the presidency again when Bill Clinton accepted certain Republican principles, or seemed to, like a globalized economy would be better than the protectionism the unions wanted, scaling back welfare would be a good thing, also passing a crime bill that added a lot more police officers around the country. We'll talk about the crime bill later in the series. Politically speaking, was the rise of Bill Clinton a kind of admission by Democrats that Republicans had won on some major ideological policy points in the court of public opinion?

Dr. Paul Krugman: Well, a little bit. No question that Clinton governed well to the right of where Democrats would have been, well to the right of Jimmy Carter, well to the right of where Democrats had been in the past. Now, that's probably over now. Mostly, we tend to exaggerate the extent to which ideological direction determines elections. Bill Clinton became president because we had a recession in 1992 that lingered even though, officially, the economy was in recovery. Things still felt really pretty bad because--

Brian Lehrer: Then people blamed the incumbent president, George HW Bush, who was running for re-election for?

Dr. Paul Krugman: Yes, and the truth is I'm not a big fan of George HW Bush, but the recession wasn't his fault. Bill Clinton was a pretty good president in a lot of ways, but the big economic recovery wasn't his fault either. Part of the thing is that the Republicans have made really big promises. It was Morning in America. Things were going to be great. In 1992, they weren't great. That set the stage for Democrats to win.

Brian Lehrer: We'll continue with Paul Krugman in a minute and bring on Greg David for a New York City view on all of this. Listeners, your memories of Clintonomics or Rudynomics, 1993, in your business or personal finances. If you're around doing those at that time or your questions or observations from anyone on how the economics of the Democratic president and Republican mayor may have helped set up the local and national economies of today, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or tweet @BrianLehrer. Stay with us.

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. We're in our six-part series, the year of Bill and Rudy, how 1993 helped set up the world of 2023 as we continue with economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. Also with us now, Greg David, who writes primarily about the New York City economy for the non-profit news organization, The City. In 1993, Greg was the editor of Crain's New York Business and was watching all this closely. By the way, they both teach at CUNY. Paul Krugman in the Graduate Center and the Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality. Greg David leads the Business & Economics Reporting Program in CUNY's Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. Greg, thanks for joining.

Greg David: Good morning, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Before we get to the Rudy factor, I assume you've been listening. We've been talking about federal policy in Bill Clinton's first years, specifically, the passage of NAFTA, the free trade agreement with Canada and Mexico, and the increase of the top income tax rate to around 39% on the top portion of the highest earners' incomes. The national economy famously boomed for the rest of the decade. Did those things matter to New York?

Greg David: Not a lot. NAFTA was regarded as a net plus until New York. New York's a global financial center. The business community was heavily engaged in being pro-NAFTA. In the end, it wasn't a significant factor in New York City's economic story for the 1990s.

Brian Lehrer: Do you have a take on NAFTA and Clinton globalization generally on the New York City economy to this day to our theme of how 1993 set up 2023? It's become so reviled by, let's say, Bernie Sanders progressives and Donald Trump fans alike.

Greg David: Well, I think that New York's business community, especially the biggest part of the business community, is globally oriented and continues to be pretty much in favor of globalization, relaxation of trade barriers, et cetera. By 1993, the manufacturing base of New York City, which had had a million jobs at the end of World War II, was approaching 200,000 jobs. It's just been continuing downhill since there. The last number I looked at put us at 50,000 manufacturing jobs and an economy that peaked at 4.6 million jobs and is currently a little below 4 million jobs.

Brian Lehrer: At the same time as Clinton is doing all that, Rudy Giuliani is running for mayor. Part of his platform is to cut taxes in New York for economic growth even as Clinton is raising them for the same reason or with the same goal nationally. Here's a clip of Giuliani about that on CNN in 1993 answering this question from CNN's Bernard Shaw.

Bernard Shaw: You're proposing to reduce four major city taxes, yet there are projections that show New York will have a nearly $2 billion budget deficit for three years in a row. How do you do that?

Rudy Giuliani: The way you do it is exactly the way it's been done in other cities, which is to reduce the size of a city government that is larger than almost every state. New York City is the third or fourth-largest state in terms of spending. We have got to reduce spending in New York. We did it once before between '75 and '83. We reduced the size of the city government by 50,000 employees during the last fiscal crisis. We have to do that again in order to put some money back into the private sector. We have got to show growth in private sector jobs in New York. If we don't do that, there's really no hope for the city.

Brian Lehrer: Giuliani in '93. Greg, put that in context and tell us, did Giuliani actually cut taxes once he got into office? Did that actually put more money for jobs into the private sector?

Greg David: Let's go to November 1993. Rudy Giuliani is elected. He beats David Dinkins by two percentage points. That's the exact same percentage point gain that Dinkins beat Giuliani four years earlier. That very month, New York finally ended the second-worst recession we had before the pandemic. We had lost 327,000 jobs between 1989 and 1993, although that compares to-- We lost 180,000 in the Great Recession. We did lose 620,000 in our Great Recession, which is '69 to '77.

Why did we lose so many jobs? Because New York's economy then was driven by Wall Street. This was a direct reaction and reflection of the 1987 stock market crash, Black Monday. We lost 523 points on the Dow. It doesn't sound like much. We've had many bigger point declines, but that was more than 20%. A decline of more than 20%. We've never seen that. Took two years and then the retrenchment on Wall Street began affecting the whole New York City economy.

Rudy takes office and the economy turns around. I remember so clearly when we talked to businesspeople. After Rudy's election, they felt a lot better. They felt better because they regarded Dinkins as a weak mayor and indecisive. Well, I'll hold the Adams analogy for a little later. It was tough going for a couple of years. We did start adding jobs but at a very slow pace.

This national economic boom that Paul Krugman talked about eventually reached New York. It reached New York in three ways. First of all, we began to build a significant tech sector. It's very significant in New York today. In the first tech boom, a lot of tech companies started here. People moved here. The most well-known of which, it was DoubleClick, which is the reason why Google is the city's largest tech employer today.

Brian Lehrer: Because they acquired DoubleClick.

Greg David: Because they acquired it. The second major reason is that Wall Street found its footing. It found its footing because of the tech boom. The tech companies raised enormous amounts of monies in IPO. They did mergers. This fueled gains on Wall Street. Those days, I used to talk about the 5/20 rule. Wall Street accounted for 5% of the city's employment, provided 20% of all the compensation in the city.

The third part to our boom was, frankly, another offshoot of the tech industries. They raised much money in IPOs. They didn't know what to do with it. They spent it on advertising and traditional media. If you go back to the years 1999 and even into 2000, the media companies are minting money. They're minting money because there's so much advertising from tech companies.

The wait period of the '90s resulted in very large gains in New York. Now, the Rudy tax cuts. Rudy cut taxes. He cut taxes modestly, but the reason taxes really went down in New York is, the following year, George Pataki was elected governor. He cut state income taxes by a much larger percentage. There were tax cuts, but the way the people who got the tax cut saw them. They came a year later and they were mostly Pataki's doing.

Brian Lehrer: Here's a kicker to that point. Then, Dr. Krugman, we're going to bring you back in and get your comment on anything Greg's been saying. This is really a kicker because we just heard Giuliani running on cutting taxes in 1993 at the city level. The very next year, footnote to history, he endorsed Democrat Mario Cuomo for re-election as governor of New York over the Republican state senator, George Pataki. Spoiler alert. Pataki won and served 12 years. Republican Mayor Rudy Giuliani endorsed Democratic Governor Mario Cuomo. Why? Because Pataki wanted to cut taxes. Here's Giuliani on Charlie Rose at the time.

Rudy Giuliani: This is something that happens when you run the city. I backed mostly Republicans in this particular case. There was a major difference between Mario Cuomo and his opponent with regard to not only the city of New York but the entire region.

Charlie Rose: What's the difference in your mind--

Rudy Giuliani: Well, there are very, very specific issues that amount to billions of dollars. I believe that the senators' views, particularly of Senator Pataki, his views on Medicaid takeover, the watershed, and the way in which he wants to do this massive tax reduction with an economy that doesn't have the room for that tax deduction is going to mean large property tax increases in the suburbs. It could create problems in New York City.

Brian Lehrer: Giuliani on Charlie Rose on PBS in 1994. Greg, why did Giuliani think cutting city taxes was good for the city, but cutting New York State taxes was bad for it? You just said it turned out to be good.

Greg David: Because Rudy Giuliani was never consistent, was he? The second part is he feared a state tax cut would result in major reductions in aid to New York City, but they were both bailed out by this improving economy. Because once the economy started to improve, tax collections picked up. I'm not suggesting, by the way, that that's good economics. A lot of this is coincidental, but they did cut taxes. New York does have incredibly high taxes. As the economy picked up, there didn't wind up being these severe budget cuts. Rudy did reduce the size of New York City government for a while, but he didn't do so in any huge way. Gradually, towards the end of its time, it began to grow again.

Brian Lehrer: Dr. Krugman, as a New Yorker at times in your life yourself, I think, do you have a take on the New York impact of Clinton or Giuliani economic policy short or long term?

Dr. Paul Krugman: Well, the funny thing is I don't think, again, it's one of these things where the policies probably matter a lot less. I always actually use this argument. Anyone who thinks that high taxes on people with high incomes are a huge disincentive to work, taxes are really quite high if you were a high-income New Yorker with earned income, not a hedge fund manager. We all know how lazy and slow-moving New Yorkers are, right?

New York is a kind of a prime example that taxes actually don't matter that much in terms of incentives. What went right for New York was, partly, the rise of Wall Street, partly this tech stuff. Again, there's a national thing. It's not just that there was a booming national economy, but something said started happening. It had already started in the '80s, but it didn't really become fully visible, which was there was a shift in the center of gravity of the whole US economy. Up until around 1980, jobs income was moving away from traditional big cities towards lower-wage parts of the country.

That went into reverse around 1980. Knowledge economy, business started moving back to big metropolitan areas with lots of highly-educated people. Very much the benefit of almost every major metropolitan area, New York, very much included. In a way again, Giuliani had the good fortune as to his successors to preside over a New York that was the beneficiary of a changing economic geography of America, which, to our advantage, very much hurt a lot of the heartland. Again, politicians have much less to do with these things than they'd like to imagine.

Brian Lehrer: Let's get a couple of caller voices on here with Paul Krugman and Greg David. Dana in Queens, you're on WNYC. Hi, Dana.

Dana: Hi. As a UFT retiree, I'm just appalled. The history that you're stating has very nice, clean lines going on, but I saw the destruction of the union movement. The importance of it politically decimated, destroyed during both Clinton and the following administration. Just like a blinder went on. All that anybody could see, Republican or Democrat who was in power, not on the street, was destructions of the unions. The unions are decimated. You'll see people hanging off the edges of streets of buildings because of that. In the union, they don't have a construction knowledge.

They're just thrown against the buildings and told to work. This is like the 1900s. It's so regressive, including the fact that our new mayor wants to take contributions from Bloomberg, who did as much as he could to destroy supports for children, for example. There were five residential treatment centers with children who were runaways or unable to stay in any foster home. He closed them all. He sold the real estate. Bloomberg's mission was to close city government. We have another mayor who wants to continue in that tradition, it seems, unless he sees the light.

Brian Lehrer: Dana, thank you very much. Dr. Krugman, you want to comment on her take with respect to unions in particular?

Dr. Paul Krugman: Yes, there was a collapse of the US union movement. There had been a gradual decline, but it really fell off a cliff mostly during the '80s. It's mostly a Reagan-year phenomenon. If you start to look into how it happened, it was partly, again, the center of gravity. The economy was shifting away from manufacturing, but there was no good reason why we couldn't have had unions rising. There was no good reason why Walmart couldn't have been unionized, but the political environment was very anti-union. That has had a lot of negative consequences. I would say, actually, New York is not great on these things, but New York has partly because the public sector has-- I remember with the PSC at the-- but New York has a stronger union--

Brian Lehrer: Because of faculty union.

Dr. Paul Krugman: We really didn't talk about Clinton's-- I had to ask. What was Clinton's biggest sin? From my point of view, it would have been ending welfare as we knew it and really not providing an alternative. We've become a lot harsher towards people in need than we were.

Brian Lehrer: Did that also get papered over in terms of its eventual effects on poor people because of the economic boom in the tech sector in the '90s, which you're both saying had very little to do with either Giuliani or Clinton policies but just with the market?

Dr. Paul Krugman: Yes, if you're going to remove aid for people in need, then having a hot job market is going to-- not everybody can take advantage of that, but it's going to help. In a lot of ways, we didn't really start to see what the demolition of the safety net was going to do until the financial crisis of 2008. Now, the good news as we did, in fact, at the national level, we have Obamacare. We did expand the food stamp program, which, in a lot of ways, took the place of a lot of existing welfare programs. There's no question. There was a harshness and a disregard for the most vulnerable that was, I have to say, shared by Clinton and Giuliani.

Brian Lehrer: Greg, what's your New York take on that?

Greg David: Well, my New York take is that there is one thing that's incredibly controversial where what Giuliani did play into the economy. That was the rapid fall in crime in New York. I think that the movement to the city and New York's rebound as this great center came later. It came later because we did need to end the perception that New York was unsafe. We've also built, of which I'm now part of, this really big university complex in New York.

We have more students in New York City than Boston has people as the line people like to use. Well, that occurred in the '90s and into the 2000s when parents around the country said, "I'm willing to send my kids to New York City now." There is some relationship here, whether Giuliani deserves credit for the decline in crime, of course. Maybe one of the most controversial questions in all of New York.

Brian Lehrer: That'll be our topic on Wednesday in this series just by the way, but go ahead.

Greg David: I'm sure you're going to cover that. The perception of the decline in crime was a key factor in making New York the center of everything that it eventually became.

Brian Lehrer: Is that the Eric Adams analogy that you were starting to make before?

Greg David: Well, the Eric Adams analogy is that when I talked to businesspeople these days, they give me the same line, which is, "We're so glad that we have a mayor who understands us and who listens to us." That's a direct contrast between how businesspeople felt about de Blasio. Well, the same thing happened in '93. Businesspeople didn't think David Dinkins had their interest at stake and then they did think Rudy Giuliani had their interest at stake.

Interestingly, these days when I press businesspeople on the specifics of what Adams has delivered, they don't have much to say in a response. The question is, how long will the good rhetoric keep businesspeople from being worried about the issues you just covered in the segment before us? The issue of the theft of stores, which I hear a lot from businesspeople.

Brian Lehrer: Well, we had a caller talking about the unions. Here's a caller in Union. Mike in Union, New Jersey, you're on WNYC. Hi, Mike.

Mike: Hi, Brian. Thanks for taking my call. The UFT teacher touched on a good point with the union destination side of things. I wanted to tie that back into NAFTA. Full disclosure, I was just a child and a teenager in the '90s when Clinton was elected. Being exposed to a lot of pop culture, I got a glimpse of Michael Moore, who had a TV show on Fox at the time, which you can go ahead and try that now.

That gave him a lot of springboard into becoming a small-time media person, which then he later hit the big time with. A lot of what Michael Moore talked about in the '90s on his two shows on Fox and I think later AMC was the effect of NAFTA on American workers, on the union movement, and how that helped speed the collapse. He took his humor take in a pretty blatant way, which then led to him becoming enough of a political figure, I think, to help bring Ralph Nader onto the 2000 elections.

I won't make the claim that Michael Moore as a blowback from Clinton's election led to Ralph Nader spoiling the Gore vote, but it draws an interesting parallel. If nothing else, it does bring in the Giuliani address part. He did have a show or one episode where he attacked Giuliani's cleanup of Times Square by having, I think, souvenir shops that could only sell 40% pornography as long as they sold 60% New York souvenirs. An interesting draw from the Clinton years.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you. Interesting memories. We're just about at a time. Bottom line very briefly from each of you. We had a Democratic president and a Republican mayor, who both rose to power in 1993. I think the takeaway that I'm hearing from both of you is that neither of them deserve credit. Neither of them deserve economic credit for the boom that came immediately afterwards. It was just the private sector overwhelming government policy, but what about the problems that we're dealing with to this day? 30 seconds, Dr. Krugman?

Dr. Paul Krugman: No, we have a huge affordable housing problem, which Mayor de Blasio made a small start on that. That's what we really need to deal with. Most other things are largely outside the control of any politician.

Brian Lehrer: Greg David?

Greg David: Rudy gets a little credit for improving the atmosphere in New York, but the boom was primarily the result of national economic factors and New York's attractiveness. That was not the result of his policies.

Brian Lehrer: That is part two of Bill and Rudy, how 1993 helped set up the world of 2023. Paul Krugman, Greg David, thank you so much. Tomorrow, part three, why Rudy Giuliani became the first Republican mayor of New York in 28 years.

 

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