In the end, of course, less is never more. Less is less. And Mayor Bloomberg is making absolutely clear that the city of the immediate future will be a city of diminished grandeur.

His proposed 264 budget cuts will lacerate almost all of us. We'll pay more taxes for less services. The city will be protected by fewer police officers. There will be eight fewer fire companies to rush to fires like the one that devastated an apartment building in Harlem the other night.

There will be fewer spots for day care, less money for summer schools, deep cuts in libraries, reductions in subsidies of cultural institutions. The city will close 32 senior citizen centers. Hard-won programs for rat control and the prevention of lead poisoning will lose some funding. And there's more. Much more.

But again: Bloomberg has no choice, and neither do we. Every politician would like to preside over a city (or a country) that is flush with money. Every politician would like to create the giddy impression that the sky is literally the limit. Every politician would like to tell his constituents: Let the good times roll.

The good times, alas, are over for now. They were ending before Sept. 11, 2001, as the economy wobbled and headed south. Every weekend in Manhattan during the first eight months of the Bush administration, you saw young people from dot-coms packing files into sport-utility vehicles to drive off into the blur of unemployment. Profits started diving, advertising in newspapers followed, including ads offering jobs. Millions of square feet of office space stood empty. And then out of a clear morning sky came the fanatics and their captured airliners.

We are still living in the aftermath of that terrible morning, and we simply can't know what might be coming. We can't know when the next blow might fall. Nor can anyone predict whether life on the planet actually will get better, reason will prevail over the irrational and the economy of New York will revive quickly.

Bloomberg can't wait for such miracles. He has to balance his budget now or cede his powers to an unelected state Financial Control Board. That's the law. The only way that New York's budget can be balanced - in the face of $7.5 billion in estimated deficits over the next two fiscal years - is by increasing taxes and cutting the costs of government.

There is no good side to any of this, but there are some consolations. All state and local taxes can be deducted from federal income taxes. That is, you can reduce your taxable income (for federal taxes) by the amount you pay in those local income and property taxes. Personally, I'd rather pay taxes to help sustain New York in its hour of need than to the federal government. Bloomberg, si, Bush, no.

"This means, of course, that you have to itemize your federal return," one accountant told me. "If you just fill out the standard form, you don't get the deduction."

Doing the math

Certainly, some of the Bloomberg plan could cause grief to people earning low salaries. One accountant took the example of a head of family with two children who earns $20,000 a year. He or she now pays about $145 in city income tax. The proposed lower city income tax rate would help lower that number. But if the subway fare goes to $2, that taxpayer will have to come up with an additional $260 a year, a dollar a day, to get to and from work. The subway fare should be every bit as deductible from taxes as a CEO's limousine - but who has time to keep such records?

"I live in Westchester," another accountant told me yesterday. "But I was against the end of the commuter tax in 1999. I want to pay my share. I want to help pay for the cops and firemen in the city, who protect me while I'm there."

Such commuters don't use all city services. They don't use the school system. They don't use day care centers or senior citizen refuges. That's why the old commuter tax was reasonably low: .45% of wages, .65% of self-employed income. The repeal of this tax in 1999 was a mistake, opposed by then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani. But repeal was based on the boom-time economy, when the city had a $3 billion surplus. That time is gone.

Now, as we know, Bloomberg is proposing to apply a lower city income tax rate - 2.7% - to all who make their living in New York, including the 800,000 commuters. Other cities do this, too (Philadelphia, for example, taxes New Jersey residents who work in the city). The initial reaction to the plan was predictable: rejection and fury.

The reasons for the anger are understandable. New Jersey needs to close a $6 billion gap (and has just raised business taxes by $1.8 billion). Connecticut faces deficits of $1 billion. Both states must do what Bloomberg is doing: create combinations of higher taxes and reduced spending. To have even more revenue drained by a New York City income tax seems to be an outrage.

Pataki's role

But what is the alternative?

Bloomberg must get his proposals through Albany. But before Bloomberg submits his plan to the Legislature, George Pataki should get all the city's neighbors involved, calling for an emergency summit of the three governors. They must set aside emotional blather and face the problem: New York is in trouble, and its fate affects all of them. They have to devise a regional recovery plan that includes increased - and perhaps shared - taxation. They have to forge a united front to petition the federal government for a larger share of their own taxes.

Above all, they have to stop whining. They have to stop throwing tantrums. We're in the era of less. It could last a very long time, and we're all going to have to live with it.
Originally published on November 21, 2002