The Disastrous Bloomberg Budget

If you weren't sure whether New York City had the highest tax burden in the nation, Mayor Bloomberg is about to remove all doubt. He's about to call for another increase in the sales tax, bringing the rate to 8.75% (from 8.375). Throw in tax (or he'll call it a fee) on plastic bags and I'm sure that local businesses will love that as business goes across the Hudson to New Jersey where Jersey City has an enterprise zone where sales tax is 3.5%. That's on top of reports that the City's economy shrank significantly in 4Q 2008.

Property tax rebates to help lessen the burden on homeowners would be yanked.

Combine tax hikes with a slowing economy is a recipe for disaster, and yet that is what the supposed financial guru Bloomberg is about to achieve.

Bloomberg also throws out the claim that he will chop teachers and police jobs, but that's just a threat to make sure that the tax hikes go through. There's plenty of pork in the NYC budget that isn't addressed, let alone those programs that should have been shuttered years ago but still receive funding. Bloomberg is just another one of those tax and spend nanny staters. Like Governor Paterson, whose tax on soft drinks still being considered in the state but which is opposed by an overwhelming majority of people, Bloomberg is looking for money in all corners of taxpayer pockets without serious consideration to cutting the fat from public payrolls.

UPDATE:
Bloomberg gave his budget presser, and the economic fallout from the financial crisis means that Wall Street firms are set to lose $47 billion from last year.

Wall Street firms will are expected to lose an estimated $47 billion as a result of last year's financial meltdown and potentially even more this year -- dealing a staggering blow to New York's economy and forcing the city to slash 20,000 jobs to close its growing budget gap, Mayor Bloomberg said.

Bloomberg, who presented his plan this afternoon at City Hall to address the city's growing budget problems as the economic picture continues to worsen, said Wall Street's losses will affect the city for years.

The mayor said "you can only get so much blood out of a stone" -- referring to budget cuts and other measures to try and close a looming $4 billion deficit.

He said at least 20,000 municipal workers would have to be let go in order to deal with the gloomy outlook.

Bloomberg said the city is projected to lose nearly 300,000 jobs through 2010 -- an estimated 46,000 from the financial sector alone.

That's $47 billion that wont get turned into tax revenues for redistribution, which means that the city and state and federal government have to find someone else to tax.

Watch Bloomberg use the threat of teacher, police, and fire job cuts to demand that his tax hikes get adopted. It would ignore the real fat in the City's budget and that the city workforce isn't being forced to pare down its benefits or costs. It's just going to slow the increases just a bit even as the feds pump more money to the same failed programs.