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GLOOMY BLOOMY BRING$ THE PAIN

Coping with a severe economic downturn, Mayor Bloomberg yesterday unveiled a bare-bones budget for next year that raises taxes and fees that will hit virtually all city residents while putting the squeeze on every city agency.

The city is in a jam because revenues are expected to tumble by $5 billion, or 13 percent, between 2008 and 2010, he explained in a detailed, 90-minute budget presentation at City Hall.

“You can only get so much blood out of a stone” with budget cuts and other measures, the mayor said.

He proposed closing a $4 billion budget gap in 2010 with $955 million in cuts and savings that reached into every agency – from the NYPD, which stood to lose another 1,000 cops through attrition, to the FDNY, which could see 12 companies vanish, to the child-welfare agency, which was asked to absorb 608 layoffs.

Also on the table: a 5-cent tax on plastic bags to bring in $84 million and an increase in parking-meter rates, along with jail visits shrinking from five days a week to four, nighttime morgue staff being downsized, ambulance tours being slashed, and parking-summons hearings taking place on fewer days.

The budget plan proposes reducing custodial service in schools. The city also might stop providing kits of household goods to homeless families transitioning into permanent housing. And 1,000 positions at the Administration for Children’s Services, which deals with abused and neglected children, would be eliminated.

In a high-stakes nudge to Gov. Paterson, Bloomberg warned he would be forced to ax 14,272 teachers if the state doesn’t pass along federal stimulus funds to make up for a $770 million cut in state education aid.

Overall, the mayor’s plan envisions nearly 23,000 fewer city employees.

His $58.8 billion spending plan for 2010 also calls for boosting the sales tax from 8.375 to 8.625 percent, reinstituting the tax on all clothing purchases and piggybacking on Albany’s plan to expand the sales tax to iPod downloads, theaters, cable-TV bills and other services.

If approved by the City Council and the state – and approval is by no means certain – the sales-tax hike would raise $894 million.

Critics demanded the mayor impose higher income taxes on the wealthy, but he indicated that choice wasn’t really available to him.

“My assumption is that the state will dramatically increase the personal income tax only because of the magnitude of what I think their problem is,” said Bloomberg, who met with Paterson Wednesday to discuss the budget.

Paterson spokesman Errol Cockfield insisted the mayor had no knowledge of a planned income-tax increase in the state budget, saying, “The governor and the mayor didn’t discuss the personal income tax.”

Both of the mayor’s leading Democratic challengers, city Comptroller Bill Thompson and Rep. Anthony Weiner, warned that the sales-tax increase would fall disproportionately on the poor and middle class.

Bloomberg also got a chilly reception from labor leaders to proposals that would require current city workers to pay 10 percent of their health-care premiums to generate $350 million a year while new workers would enter a lower pension tier with reduced benefits.

If unions resist – which they have every year since the mayor took office in 2002 – Bloomberg said large-scale layoffs would inevitably follow.

Harry Nespoli, chairman of the Municipal Labor Committee, gave no sign that labor leaders were ready to budge.

“We cannot be placed in a position where wages are greatly diminished by new benefit costs we are asked to assume,” he said in a statement.

david.seifman@nypost.com

EDITORIAL: Bloomy’s Budget