Is Fernando Ferrer trying to lose the election for mayor? It’s hard to imagine any other reasonable interpretation of what the former Bronx borough president did yesterday in promising the voters a huge tax increase if he is elected. And he wants a stamp tax to boot. Call him King George Ferrer.

Last week, one of Mr. Ferrer’s rivals in the Democratic primary, Rep. Anthony Weiner, announced a plan that would cut taxes overall in the city by $127 million a year. One can differ, as we have, with Mr. Weiner’s plan to distribute that tax cut only to families making less than $300,000 a year, and to actually raise taxes on those making more than $1 million a year. But at least Mr. Weiner’s plan, taken as a whole, reduces the overall state and local tax burden in New York, which is already among the nation’s highest.

Mr. Ferrer, on the other hand, proposes to raise taxes by about $1 billion a year by going after Wall Street with a tax of half a penny on many shares of stock traded on the New York Stock Exchange. The attack on the financial services industry is, as Mr. Weiner aptly put it, “like a politician from Wisconsin proposing a dairy tax.” A billion dollars is a big tax increase – to put it in context, it is far more than the city of New York spends annually in total on libraries and parks.

Mr. Ferrer said in a speech yesterday that the burden of his tax would fall on “wealthy investors” and Wall Street “executives” who “raked in $15.9 billion in bonuses last year.” But the shares that Mr. Ferrer would tax are widely held and traded by ordinary New Yorkers. City schoolteachers and bus drivers have stocks in their union pension funds. According to the Investment Company Institute, 48% of American households owned mutual funds in 2004, including 61% of households with incomes of $50,000 to $74,999. Those percentages may include some funds that do not invest in stocks, but they don’t include those households that own stocks directly, not through mutual funds. So Mr. Ferrer is wrong when he implies the tax would only affect a few super-rich executives or speculators.

What’s more, Wall Street is already paying a huge share of New York’s expenses. Those investment banks already pay a commercial rent tax on their office space and a share of the property tax through their rents. They pay a general corporation tax. Their employees pay city income tax on their earnings and city property tax on their property. They pay sales tax when they go out for drinks or meals or shopping for clothes. They pay a lot of taxes already, so much so that when Wall Street has a bad year, the New York municipal budget lurches into a deficit.

The most stunning part of Mr. Ferrer’s speech to us was where he cited the British stamp tax as something that New York should somehow emulate. “The London Stock Exchange today has a stamp tax on stock trades 25 times larger than the Capped Transaction Charge I’m proposing,” Mr. Ferrer said in a copy of his speech that was distributed by his campaign aides yesterday. “In 2001, London’s traders made a big push to do away with the stamp tax, but the government resisted. What happened? Just last month, the London Exchange announced record-breaking numbers for trading volume and trading value.”

London? The “stamp tax”? Maybe Mr. Ferrer missed that day of American history class, but plenty of New Yorkers know that the American Revolution was founded in opposition to a British plan to impose in America a tax on paper. There are plenty of parallels. Paper was as basic to commerce in colonial America as stock is today. The Stamp Act was imposed on Americans as taxation without representation, just as Mr. Ferrer, in words that doubtless will be quoted in a legal brief if this scurrilous levy ever becomes law, crowed yesterday, “because many shareholders live elsewhere, a big part of this would be shouldered by wealthy investors in other states.”

The ex-president of the Bronx sounds like a member of Britain’s Parliament boasting that the Stamp Act will be paid by the colonists rather than the English. Even the size of the Ferrer tax – half a penny a share, in many cases – is eerily similar to the Stamp Act tax of half a penny on each copy of a standard-sized newspaper. The Stamp Act prompted at least some colonial era newspapers to place a skull and bones where the stamp would go. It was a symbol of the poison that the stamp would pose to commerce and to freedom. It’s an apt sticker for what Mr. Ferrer’s tax plan would do to the city today.