Tax-and-Spend Bloomberg

That was quite a default by Mayor Bloomberg in his defense this week of his plan to raise taxes by extending the $1 billion a year sales tax on New Yorkers. The $1 billion in sales taxes had been scheduled to expire. The mayor's defense was to offer the New York Sun reporter asking him about it a chance to do the job that the voters elected the mayor to do. "If you can tell me which programs you'd like to cut, which city employees you'd like to lay off, which neighborhoods you don't want to protect, I'd be happy to listen to that," Mr. Bloomberg said, suggesting nothing so much as that he actually would not be happy to listen to that. "We are going to have some real budgetary problems, and this city is going to need a lot of revenue. I've been telling you all along there are big, enormous deficits facing us."

We'd refer the mayor to the 23-part editorial series, "Closing the Gap," that this newspaper ran in November 2002 through January of 2003. It suggested a range of measures to close the city's budget gap, then $6 billion, starting with selling Gracie Mansion. That suggestion, incidentally, annoyed Mr. Bloomberg so much that he promptly kvetched about it to the State Legislature and then, in a meeting with editors at News Corp., to Rupert Murdoch. But even after all the complaining, he still doesn't deign to use Gracie Mansion as his residence.

We suggested bidding out the city's bus service, ending free press parking, eliminating the mayor's office of film, theater, and broadcasting, reducing public funding of political campaigns, eliminating the city human rights commission, reducing the number of paid holidays for city workers, requiring a 40-hour work week from city employees, and ending the fluoridation of water. We found $6.42 billion worth of cuts in the city's budget without breaking a sweat or even having to decide, as the mayor put it, not to protect certain neighborhoods.

Back then, the city's budget was a mere $43 billion. Since then, under Mr. Bloomberg's leadership, the city's budget has exploded to a scandalous $54 billion. That doesn't include "capital" spending, which is another $7 billion or $8 billion a year. And Brooklyn Bridge is still a rusting hulk about which even Senator Schumer complains. The city's taxpayers could get the $1 billion sales tax cut we have coming to us were Mr. Bloomberg merely to return to the taxpayers one eleventh of the new spending he has added to a city government that was already the most expensive in the history of American cities.

We're among the mayor's biggest fans, and we've been urging him to run for president. He is an honest and hardworking public servant, who has a story to tell about his crime reductions in New York City and the building boom, job growth, and expansion of charter schools on his watch. He has the best position of any national figure on immigration. But if the mayor won't even take advantage of scheduled, preexisting tax cuts for New York City, what hope is there that as president he would be able to withstand the enormous pressure from a Democratic Congress to pay for pork-barrel spending with tax increases? What hope is there that he would rein in spending on entitlements?

And what if he finds himself in a presidential race against, say, a Senator McCain, who has won a reputation in Washington by releasing lists of wasteful pork-barrel spending projects? If the best Mr. Bloomberg can do on fiscal policy in New York is to ask the City Hall press corps for suggestions while heading to Albany with a request for a $1 billion tax increase on New York City shoppers, it's going to take this mayor a lot more than the half-billion dollars Mr. Bloomberg is reportedly prepared to spend to win the White House.