DMI: More Taxes Please

We are constantly bemused by the persistence of the Drummers on the need to tax more "wealthy" New York City residents. On today's blog Andrea Batista Schlesinger goes after Nicole Gelinas for her editorial in today's NY Sun. What we'd really like to know is how this old fashioned liberal policy approach will play well with the very middle class voters that the Drummers say they are looking to save.

We guess that this will depend on how we define middle class, since the Drummers see a family of four earning $135,000 as on the way out of the category. Which says to us that this family, and the many more like it, will become the target of all of the new tax initiatives supposedly directed at the billionaires. We still remember how the mayor's real estate tax boost in 2002 sent many Staten Islanders packing off to Jersey.

The key variable here is making the new homeowners able to afford the houses they have just been able to get the down payments for. Remember the Blooomberg tax increase was over 20% and, with the rise in assessments, the monthly nut got really difficult to handle.

What was really instructive in today's DMI post was its citation of a letter from one Gary Brubaker who inveighed against the "i-bankers" with an envious scorn that says much about this entire point-of-view. We're going to be interested in seeing just which of the Democratic mayoral candidates jumps aboard this losing bandwagon, after all, we need to place our bets early for 2009.