MANCHESTER, N.H. - Rudy Giuliani warned Saturday that his Democratic rivals would hit American families with up to $3 trillion in tax hikes and promised to slash taxes as president, but he offered few specifics on how he'd find the money to pay for his plan.

Giuliani said if any of the top Democrats is elected president, a family of four earning $50,000 a year would pay more than $2,000 in additional taxes -- because most of the Democrats have proposed rolling back or eliminating President George W. Bush's tax cuts.

"I think the promise to raise taxes is a promise they will keep," Giuliani said. He pledged to make Bush's tax cuts permanent and focused on other targets of conservative ire in the tax code: killing the inheritance tax and "marriage penalty" that causes couples to pay more. He'd also cut corporate tax rates, which few expect Bush to accomplish before leaving office..

At one point, Giuliani mocked a statement by Democratic rival Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton that the government sometimes must take taxes from people to pay for the "common good ... Do you understand what that implies?" he asked.

"Karl Marx?" someone in the audience responded, referring to the communist author.

"No, it's not Karl Marx. What she's saying ... is that 'We know better, the government knows better,'" he said. "The Democrats believe in government when they have a choice. Republicans believe in people."

Clinton's office shot back that Giuliani misunderstands the situation. "If he's attacking Senator Clinton for wanting to change President Bush's economic policies and his Iraq policy, he's right. She will," Kathleen Strand said.

Giuliani has pushed his New York tax-cutting record onto an almost equal footing with national security in his campaign message -- two potent conservative themes he hopes will trump Republican uneasiness over his moderate social stances. But his campaign also signaled that it will target a fellow Republican over taxes. A top Giuliani adviser here said the ex-mayor's New York record far outstrips Mitt Romney's in Massachusetts.

"Mitt Romney, he was governor for four years, he did not cut taxes," said one of Romney's predecessors as governor, Paul Cellucci. Romney's campaign disputed that characterization, saying Romney eliminated a $3-billion deficit he inherited by holding the line against tax increases and cutting spending.

Still, for the second time this summer, Giuliani rolled out one of the central initiatives of his campaign with few details to back it up -- just as when he acknowledged he didn't know how many of the uninsured his health-care plan would cover. By pledging to keep in place Bush tax cuts estimated to amount to $3 trillion over 10 years, he is, in effect, pledging to wring most of that money out of the federal budget someplace else. But Giuliani's campaign offered few details on what trade-offs he would make to pay for the tax cuts.

One of his top economic advisers, former Ronald Reagan adviser Michael Boskin, said Giuliani believes part of it can be made up by his plan to cut the federal workforce by 25 percent, an annual savings of $21 billion, as well as through other budget cuts and added government efficiency.

Other candidates have banked on "waste and efficiency" as the route to budget cutting, but Boskin said Giuliani really can do it, because he did it in New York. But his fiscal record in New York has come under fire from independent experts, who say his oft-repeated claim of cutting 23 separate taxes is an exaggeration. Giuliani only proposed 15 cuts and fought one of the biggest, an income-tax cut.

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