Just call him Mayor Blowhard.
Or, compared to Gov. Cuomo, maybe Mayor Mouse is more apt.
Both Mike Bloomberg and Andrew Cuomo this year introduced budgets marinated in apocalyptic rhetoric — to reform their respective governments and curb their unions’ appetites.
Cuomo got the principal state-employees union to agree to a contract that could save taxpayers billions in coming years.
Bloomberg got the teachers union to give up a year of paid study sabbaticals.
Big whoop.
Cuomo’s first six months yielded:
* A budget that actually cut spending — and plugged a $10 billion gap without tax hikes or new debt.
* The first statutory ceiling on property-tax hikes in New York history.
* A three-year wage freeze from the union that represents about a third of all state employees.
* New ethics rules that, despite loopholes, will boost transparency in Albany.
Not a bad start.
And Bloomberg?
Bupkes.
The budget he forged last week hikes spending by another $2.5 billion (nearly 4 percent) — even as the city faces massive budget gaps in coming years.
The 4,100 teacher layoffs he’d been threatening for months?
Bluff bait. Forget about it.
There was no apparent effort to use budget leverage to get the United Federation of Teachers to back off on the lawsuits and other legalistic nitpicking now under way to undermine the control of schools he won in 2002.
But what makes Bloomberg’s failings so glaring is how they have diminished City Hall politically, relative to Albany.
Cuomo’s refusal to ship hundreds of millions to the city, no questions asked, meant as many as 21,000 city jobs would be axed, said the mayor and his minions.
Thousands of teachers, in particular, would be lost.
“If the state does not come through,” Bloomberg said, “the cuts will be more painful than ever.”
And when the governor and others questioned his falling-sky claims, Bloomberg blew a gasket.
“The governor’s office is not an expert on the city,” the mayor fumed. “I think we have a little more credibility in speaking about what we can afford.”
Except that the governor’s office has access to the same tax-revenue information as City Hall. Cuomo’s budgeteers said privately all along that Bloomberg was bluffing — and so he was.
Just as Cuomo was not.
During his first six months in office, Albany has taken tentative steps toward normalcy — the lack of high drama masking how truly wrenching and potentially transformative the process really was.
Bloomberg has been about nothing but theater this year, to no discernable good effect.
He’s congratulating himself on a budget well done; in fact, it all added up to just another wasted opportunity.
Meanwhile, history is paying attention.