Mayor Bloomberg said raising gas taxes would be great for the city because it would get more people off the roads and force them to ride buses and trains.
“I mean, it’s not popular,” Bloomberg said of such a propsal this morning on his radio show.
“If you’re a capitalist, which I am, and you want to solve the problem that we’re driving gas guzzlers and we’re driving too much and not using mass transit, you have higher fuel prices.”
This is not the first time Bloomberg has backed such a controversial plan.
With drivers around the country fuming about rising gas prices last summer, Bloomberg dropped a bombshell into their tanks by calling for increased fuel taxes to cut consumption.
The billionaire mayor offered the politically explosive suggestion during a discussion of offshore drilling in Boca Raton – a sensitive issue in Florida – following a speech about then-presidential candidate Barack Obama to a Jewish group.
At the time, Bloomberg endorsed drilling as part of a comprehensive energy strategy and said he’d been even-handed in his criticism of the presidential candidates – lambasting Obama on free trade and Republican John McCain on the gas tax.
“I think he [McCain] and Hillary Clinton couldn’t both have been more wrong when they wanted to reduce the gasoline tax during the summer,” the mayor said at the time.
Then he added some advice, which made motorists cringe.
“They should be raising the tax and encouraging people to reduce consumption,” he said. “The anti-tax people don’t like that. But using capitalism to encourage the right behavior is exactly the [right] direction of going. Tax policy is the way government uses capitalism.”