Here come the tax hikes — and they’re going to hurt like hell.
And they are especially going to hurt New Yorkers — who live in a high-cost-of-living town, where salaries are disproportionately high, and so are tax bills.
There’s less than a week to go ’til the Bush-era tax cuts expire — that is, until America tumbles off the fiscal cliff and everybody’s wallet gets lighter.
Until now, the debate — will Washington avoid catastrophe or will it not — has been largely cast in abstracts.
Now it’s time to talk about real dollars.
As charts published in today’s Post reveal, the immediate impact of falling off the cliff would be devastating.
And not just on the wealthiest taxpayers, as the White House contends.
The average family with an annual income of $150,000 — hardly a king’s ransom in New York City — would see its taxes go up $6,616.
That’s $550 a month, or $130 each and every week, sucked out of the local economy and shipped off to Washington.
And a couple earning a mere $50,000 annually will get socked, too, losing more than $2,000 a year — or $170 a month, or just a little bit less than the cost of two monthly MetroCards.
It’s not chump change, in other words.
Meanwhile, those earning million-dollar salaries — rare ducks in most of America, but common enough in New York — will be paying an additional $50,000 annually.
And while the “millionaires” presumably can afford that, it remains that across-the-board tax increases of such magnitude will extract hundreds of millions, if not billions, from New York’s economy.
At the high end, that means less money for investment and job creation.
At the low end, it means even more tightly stretched household budgets.
And for City Hall, it means a tighter budget, too, given that its own income-tax revenues will reflect an economy battered to the bone by the heavy federal tax bite.
That could — and probably would — mean fewer cops, firefighters and teachers.
Frankly, even the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who first spotlighted the enormous inequality between what New Yorkers pay in federal taxes and what they get back from Washington, would be scandalized by what’s occurring.
Yes, there are other key issues involved — like the need to focus on cuts in entitlement spending, which Washington has thus far refused to consider.
But the immediate issue — in a very real sense — is taxes.
This isn’t an inside-the-Beltway tap dance. It’s something that will negatively affect each and every American, in a very big way.
New Yorkers, most of all.