Rudy Giuliani certainly began his mayoralty as a model of fiscal rectitude: his first budget, for 1994-95, actually reduced costs and he cut the number of city employees (see chart).
Treasury sources said the theme of the budget would be the need for fiscal rectitude to underpin recovery, but there are also likely to be job creation measures, help for small businesses and money for pensioners.
Amazingly, however, those most vociferously demanding state and federal budget cutbacks in the name of fiscal rectitude also support tax cuts for those most able to pay.
And if the hypocrisy is breathtaking — politicians who voted for budget-busting tax cuts posing as apostles of fiscal rectitude, politicians demonizing attempts to rein in Medicare costs one day (death panels!), then denouncing excessive government spending the next — well, what else is new?
For all his claims of fiscal rectitude, John Boehner, the House speaker, immediately dismissed the budget experts' report as "their opinion".
Sure there's chicanery, but compared with any recent real-life budget, from Republican or Democratic administrations, these approaches are models of fiscal rectitude.
Knowing that the government has earned a reputation for fiscal rectitude, but not one for growth-hungry dynamism, he wants this budget to be a giant, unmistakable symbol of support for enterprise and wealth creation.
The sanctions being discussed, diplomats say, include forcing national parliaments to tear up planned budgets and start again and sending in inspectors to crack the whip of fiscal rectitude.
Germany, which is dragging its feet on the banking supervisor despite having proposed the move in June, revived calls for an independent European budgets tsar based at the European Commission who would enjoy sweeping powers of enforcing fiscal rectitude by overruling national governments' and parliaments' budgetary policies.
And worries were growing about the growing budget deficit, which undermines the claim of Mr Bush's Republicans to be the party of fiscal rectitude.
