Mayor de Blasio is denying that a connection exists between the votes set for Friday on a pay raise for the City Council and the deal over the horse carriages in Central Park. To which I say: “Horsepucky.”

The connection is that they’re both an insult — an affliction — of the long-suffering taxpayers of New York. They are a grab for money and power by a permanent political class that lives better than the public it serves.

People resent it. This, in my reckoning, is one of the biggest issues in the city. It could yet ignite a mayoral challenge of the sort that the current mayor ought to understand better than almost anyone.

Mr. De Blasio, after all, rode to office on a campaign against the elitism of Bloombergism. He showed how suddenly these resentments can defy the pollsters and erupt into a political squall. And even sweep away an old guard.

Remember the transit strike of 2005? Hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers were forced to trudge home on foot after working all day to pay transit workers better salaries, benefits and retirement than those of the tax-paying schlumps who employ them.

Or, say, the contretemps over the seizure of a choice patch of public park in Brooklyn for parking for judges? The judges get to park next to their courthouse, while the taxpayers they work for have to prowl the streets looking for a parking spot.

The most incredible of these affronts was the lawsuit by the then-highest judge in the state, Judith Kaye, of the Court of Appeals. In 2008, she asked a court below her to order the Legislature to give her and the rest of the judges a raise.

In-cred-i-ble, right? Of course, she won the case in the court below. When it got to her court, she won there, too (though she’d already retired). So a commission was enacted to give the judges a raise. Two members of the commission get appointed by — wait for it — the chief judge.

The judges’ raises, the chauffeurs for officials, the lulus for legislators, the snow-shoveling Fire Department subordinates — few amount to more than a hill of beans. Eventually, though, the cataract of such insults invites an uprising at the polls.

This is the context in which the council is going to decide whether to give itself and the rest of the city’s 64 elected officials a raise — as high as 32 percent. When’s the last time a privately employed taxpayer got that kind of hike in his paycheck?

Two council members — Brad Lander and Richie Torres — took to the pages of Crain’s New York Business to justify a pay hike. No doubt they’re idealistic public servants, like most of the city’s elected officials.

Certainly, they say, they recognize that many New Yorkers would rather shrink the council than give its members a raise. Yet they try to wrap the plans for their latest dip into the taxpayers’ wallets in the blather of good-government reforms.

“By eliminating ‘lulus’ — stipends for leadership positions — we will diminish favoritism and promote independence,” they write. If lulus promote favoritism and discourage independence, why not just eliminate them? Period.

Lander and Torres boast making council positions “full-time” and banning “outside employment” will “remove temptations to corruption.” Imagine a taxpayer going to his employer and saying, in effect, “give me a raise or I might be tempted to take a bribe.”

Not only that, but the City Council is voting to raise its pay in the current term. That is such an affront that the states actually passed a constitutional amendment — the 27th — to prohibit the US Congress from trying such a stunt.

So basic an ethical violation is the idea of a Legislature raising its own pay that it’s not allowed even in Albany. The state Constitution itself bars the Assembly and Senate from raising their own pay in a current term.

Apologists for the idea that the City Council is doing so like to point out that it hasn’t had a raise in 10 years. These happen to be 10 years of low growth in the consumer-price index. Millions have seen their wages fall, if they can find work at all.

I’d like to think Friday’s vote will produce the makings of a Republican campaign for mayor. Say . . . maybe the next mayor could require the “full-time” councilmembers to clean out the stables for the carriage horses. What a lulu that would be.

This column first appeared in the New York Post.