Newly inaugurated New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio came right out of the gate with all of his rhetorical class-warmongering guns blazing, going on about his plans to tackle the “the inequality crisis we face today” by asking “the very wealthy to pay a little more in taxes” to fund the city’s “march toward a fairer, more just, more progressive place,” and etcetera with all of the usual trite populist fiction progressives throw around. Former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani, however, thinks that even the term “progressive” is too generous in describing the egregiously old-and-busted policies of which de Blasio is now trumpeting himself as a noble pioneer. “Retrogressive” is rather closer to the mark, Giuliani insisted on Fox News last night:

Also, I’m getting really annoyed at this concept of “progressive.” There’s absolutely nothing “progressive” in this class warfare stuff — it’s retrogressive. Every single policy that they’re talking about is a policy that has failed several times historically going back 130-140 years. We’re talking about basically Marxist ideas. We saw them used in Eastern Europe, we saw them used in Asia, we saw them used — I took over a city, that was a disaster. First thing I did was lower taxes, not raise taxes. Next thing I did was require people on welfare to work. I said, ‘If you want your welfare check, you have to work.’ … The amount of people I took off welfare? How about 500 to 600,000. … In New York, you are the junior partner in your earnings. The government is the senior partner. You’re not working for you and your family mostly, you’re working for everybody else mostly. … These are presented as new ideas. These are all ideas that have failed. They were at the heart of why this city was a disaster in 1993, 1994. They were at the heart of why the city had 10.5 percent unemployment, why the city had a deficit of 2 to 3 billion dollars.