If elected mayor, Rep. Anthony Weiner pledged yesterday, he will raise the marginal city income-tax rate by 12% for millionaires. The pledge made him the first candidate in the race to advocate an income-tax hike.

The Democrat, whose congressional district straddles Brooklyn and Queens, issued the proposal yesterday as part of a policy package promising tax relief for middle-class New Yorkers and the elimination of wasteful spending in the city budget.

The increased tax burden for New York’s highest earners, Mr. Weiner said in a speech at Fordham University’s law school, would help finance a 10% cut in the city’s marginal income-tax rate for individuals earning $150,000 a year or less. According to Mr. Weiner’s campaign spokesman, Anson Kaye, those individuals constitute the city’s bottom four tax brackets, which was why the congressman set $150,000 as the upper limit for the tax break. Since Mr. Weiner’s proposals apply to individual and not joint income, however, the 10% cut could benefit New Yorkers with household incomes of as much as $300,000.

The Weiner campaign said it did not have estimates for how much the rate changes might affect typical New Yorkers’ tax bills.

Arguing that middle-class New Yorkers are overtaxed and that Mayor Bloomberg is unsympathetic to their plight, Mr. Weiner said he would ease their burden by implementing a 5% tax-rate increase on individuals earning more than $1 million a year in income, for whom he would create a new bracket in the city’s tax code. The adjustment would increase their marginal tax rate to 4.67% from the 4.45% rate imposed in 2003.

That 4.45% rate, however, was the result of a temporary tax increase for New Yorkers with incomes of $500,000 a year or more, who in 2002 paid taxes at a marginal rate of 3.648%. That temporary increase is set to expire at the end of this year. By the time a Mayor Weiner could implement his proposals, the marginal tax rate for millionaires would have reverted to the 3.648% rate. Raising the rate to 4.67%, then, would actually yield a 12% increase at the time of the adjustment, Mr. Kaye said.

That increase, he said, would provide an extra $79 million in revenue to the city on an annual basis. Mr. Kaye said. The tax cuts for those earning less than $150,000, however, would cost the city $206 million, resulting in a net loss of $127 million from Mr. Weiner’s redistribution plan.

The congressman and his campaign, though, argue that the tax proposal is part of a larger reform package that will generate around $3 billion for the city.

In his remarks yesterday, Mr. Weiner proposed that, following a yearly evaluation, the city either cut or reform the programs that constitute the least efficient 5% of the budget. That effort to control city spending would save $1.7 billion a year, the congressman said.

Additional revenue would be generated by his administration’s being more “aggressive” with Albany, Mr. Weiner said in his Fordham address. He advocated, in particular, a mayoral effort to get state government and state-affiliated authorities to pay taxes on properties they own in the city. There are roughly 1,000 such properties, Mr. Weiner said, and the state pays taxes on only 12 of them. Forcing Albany to bear its full real-estate tax burden would provide $1.5 billion for the city, the congressman said.

A tax analyst at the Empire Center for New York State Policy, E.J. McMahon, said Mr. Weiner would do more good for the city’s finances and individual New Yorkers by limiting his reform plan to these spending cuts, instead of also raising taxes on the highest-earning New Yorkers.

New York’s millionaires, he said, number roughly 13,000 – less than 1% of the city’s population. Yet they pay nearly one-third of the city’s taxes, Mr. McMahon said. Mr. Weiner’s proposal to shift even more of New York’s tax burden to that “tiny sliver” of the tax base was “the most foolish and shortsighted tax policy imaginable,” the analyst said.

Because the income of New York’s millionaires is highly volatile, with much of it invested in the stock market, an increasing fiscal reliance on that group would make tax revenues less stable, Mr. McMahon said. Much of New York’s recent budget woes, he added, could be attributed to the beating that millionaires took when the stock-market bubble burst in 2001. When their income stream was diminished by the economic downturn, a disproportionate amount of the city’s tax base evaporated, Mr. McMahon said.

Mr. Weiner’s proposal would only increase the city’s vulnerability to such fluctuations, Mr. McMahon said.

“When they get a cold, the city treasury gets pneumonia,” he said of millionaires.

A tax scholar at the National Center for Policy Analysis in Washington, Bruce Bartlett, said another flaw in Mr. Weiner’s proposal was that it presumed millionaires would remain in New York to help finance the middle-class tax break.

Because millionaires often have more options in how they receive income – business owners, for example, can shift income from wages to capital gains or dividends to minimize income taxes – many of the New Yorkers from whom Mr. Weiner expects to generate millions could end up dodging their tax hike through various shelters. And since many millionaires own second homes, Mr. Bartlett said, an increased tax rate could push them to declare homes in Connecticut, or New Jersey, or Florida – which has no personal income tax – as their primary residences, depriving New York City of their tax contributions altogether.

If those millionaires are driven out of New York, Mr. McMahon said, it would be members of the middle class – the very individuals Mr. Weiner is seeking to help – who would lose out. Millionaires, the analyst said, are employers of the middle class, and driving millionaires out of the city takes away middle-class jobs. When people say, of someone earning millions a year, “What’s 50-grand to him?” they should “tell it to the guy in whose business he was going to invest, tell it to the guy he was going to pay $50,000 to rebuild his kitchen,” Mr. McMahon said.

In a phone interview with The New York Sun after the Fordham speech, Mr. Weiner explained the motives behind his proposal.

“I think taxes in Bloomberg’s New York are too high,” the congressman said, “and I think they’re particularly too high on middle-class New Yorkers.”

Restructuring the tax code to place more of the responsibility on millionaires, Mr. Weiner said, “is a matter of my values.”

“I think we need to make the tax code more progressive in New York,” the congressman said, “and making another tax bracket makes it more progressive.”

Both Mr. McMahon and Mr. Bartlett said Mr. Weiner’s proposal struck them as politically motivated class warfare more than as a plan to help individual New Yorkers and the city’s economy.

A professor of public administration at Columbia University, Steven Cohen, said Mr. Weiner’s plan was a “symbolic gesture” with political motivations.

“Any time you soak the rich, it’s a populist move,” Mr. Cohen said, adding that the proposal was probably an attempt to reach out to Mr. Weiner’s constituency of “average New Yorkers” in the outer boroughs.

Mr. Cohen said it was unclear what effect Mr. Weiner’s proposed tax restructuring would have on his campaign. It could, however, result in unintended consequences, because the outer boroughs and Mr. Weiner’s constituency contain many upwardly mobile New Yorkers, including immigrants, the professor said.

“Every working-class person thinks they’ll make a million dollars, or if they don’t, their kids will,” Mr. Cohen said. “That’s why sometimes strategies where you tax the rich backfire in political terms.”

For his part, the political target of Mr. Weiner’s statements today seemed unruffled by them.

Speaking at a press conference in Washington – after meetings with lawmakers on Capitol Hill and with the secretary of homeland security, Michael Chertoff – Mr. Bloomberg said of Mr. Weiner’s proposals: “We’re not here to talk about tax policy, and I don’t know that he knows anything about tax policy, but I can’t speak for him.”