Taxes should be increased for everyone — not just the rich — to break the logjam in Washington over how to reduce the nation’s towering deficit, Mayor Michael Bloomberg declared today.
“The easiest thing to do, the fairest thing to do, is a small percentage on everything,” the mayor recommended on his weekly WOR radio show.
“So if you want to raise taxes, don’t pick one class of people and say, ‘I think they have too much money,’ or ‘I don’t think they have enough money’ or whatever. Raise everybody’s taxes 1 or 2 percent, whatever it was.”
Bloomberg said an across-the-board tax hike could short the rancorous debate that’s made the federal government “dysfunctional.”
“The practicality of getting something done, where you pick and choose, will tie us up forever,” he warned.
The mayor offered the same remedy on the cut side, with evenly distributed reductions in Medicare, Medicaid and military spending.
“We can sit here forever and say we’re going to reform the tax code, we’re going to reform how Medicare’s done. You will never get it done,” he argued.
Earlier in the week, an editorial posted on the Bloomberg LP news service criticized Republican leaders for opposing “any solution to the US fiscal mess that involves revenue increases.”
“One of the oddest aspects of the debate is that the Republican position may not even be good politics — at least outside safe Republican districts. Public opinion polls show an increasing acceptance of the need to raise taxes to put the nation’s fiscal house in order. (A large majority of voters would like to see the wealthiest 1 percent raise their hands first.),” the editorial said.
The mayor himself has gone out of his way to apportion blame for the nation’s fiscal ills on both sides, Democrats and Republicans.