Not content to meddle in the classroom, City Council speaker and mayoral candidate Gifford Miller announced yesterday that he also wants to increase the commuter tax on hapless folks who work in the city but live outside of it. He says the tax would generate another $500 million in revenue, which he would devote to mass transit. The only good news about this plan is that, as our Jill Gardiner reports today, it has no chance of passing in Albany.

That $500 million may not even fully account for the long-term cost of such a tax increase. At a time when financial services jobs (the real cash cows the commuter tax tries to tap) are heading over the borders to Greenwich, Conn., and Jersey City, N.J., New York can’t afford to become a less attractive place for employers to set up shop. That alone would be reason enough for New York City residents to dispose of the Miller plan as a bad idea. It also raises a red flag in respect of Mr. Miller’s overall approach, namely his tendency to reach for taxpayers’ wallets.

Mr. Miller’s desire to differentiate himself from Mayor Bloomberg is understandable, but this is a strange way to go about doing it. The mayor has proposed giving at least some of a record city surplus back to beleaguered taxpayers in the form of reductions in the clothing tax. Congressman Anthony Weiner wants to reduce the income tax overall but raise it on the rich. Fernando Ferrer, meanwhile, has paid the price at the polls for proposing a $1 billion a year increase in the stock transfer tax.

Some will no doubt try to suggest that Mr. Miller’s scheme at least has the political virtue of falling on people who can’t vote against him this fall. In fact, it does fall on ordinary New York voters, if indirectly, by making it more expensive to hire people who have to commute and by driving investment away. Most of all, it signals that Mr. Miller has the temperament of a taxer rather than a tax cutter. It’s something the voters of New York, already heavily taxed, will want to avoid.