Two days ago, former mayor Rudy Giuliani attacked a speech by Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) in which she promised “to pursue ‘shared prosperity’ by increasing taxes on Americans making more than $200,000 a year.”

“This would be an astounding, staggering tax increase,” Mr. Giuliani told reporters yesterday after a visit to a restaurant on the edge of California’s Silicon Valley. “She wants to go back to the 1990s…. It would hurt our economy. It would hurt this area dramatically. That kind of tax increase would see a decline in your venture capital. It would see a decline in your ability to focus on new technology.”

As Steve Benen noted, “going after Hillary Clinton for wanting to bring America back to the 1990s isn’t exactly a persuasive pitch. Most of the country would love to go back to the ’90s.” But Giuliani’s attacks are particularly hypocritical, since he has now “refused to sign a pledge not to raise taxes if elected president.”

The conservative group Americans for Tax Reform has asked all 10 Republican presidential candidate to sign the vow.

Seven have signed the “Taxpayer Protection Pledge” – including former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who is running well in the early primary-voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire.

But front-runner Giuliani has declined thus far, as have John McCain and Tommy Thompson.

A Giuliani adviser told the New York Post that “signing the pledge was unnecessary” since “Rudy’s got a record of cutting taxes.” So why not just sign the pledge, Rudy? Or do you too want to return America to the nightmare of peace and prosperity?

I haven’t read the whole book, but I read through Bryan Caplan’s Cato policy analysis essay based on The Myth of the Rational Voter, and I have to say I’m a bit puzzled. The conclusion is that the solution to voter irrationality is libertarianism — “A better understanding of voter irrationality advises us to rely less on democracy and more on the market.” So far so good. But the argument that voters are irrational turns out to substantially turn on the claims that voters are irrationally averse to adopting libertarian policies.

I don’t really get it. What about my political views is supposed to change in response to this insight? There doesn’t seem to be anything here that would count as an independent reason to favor more libertarian policies than the ones I already favor.

Soldiers at New York’s Fort Drum “who are killed in combat will be honored during monthly group memorials instead of individual services beginning in June.” The same policy was announced recently by the commanding general of Fort Lewis in Washington. He wrote in a memo, “I am afraid that with the number of soldiers we now have in harm’s way, our losses will preclude us from continuing to do individual memorial ceremonies.”

Progressive blogger Steve Gilliard, editor and publisher of TheNewsBlog, has died at the age of 41. A photo from Steve’s appearance at the 2005 Campus Progress conference:

You can share your thoughts on Steve here.

Percentage of Americans who “think U.S. troops would still be in Iraq when U.S. president George W. Bush leaves office.”