Before taking his seat at a New York Carib News Editorial Board meeting almost two years ago, Carl McCall, at the time New York State’s Comptroller, spotted a New York City legislator from Brooklyn in the room.

McCall’s rebuke was swift and penetrating.

“You made a terrible mistake when you supported the elimination of the commuter tax,” said the Comptroller. “The City needs the money and you should have known better.”

That complaint is perhaps more pertinent today than it was when it was delivered. For as homeowners in the five boroughs and other taxpayers are being forced to shell out more of their income to the State and the City and as services to the elderly, the youth and those in between are being drastically reduced to reduce the gaping budget deficits, the folly of eliminating the commuter tax hits home.

Now, Mayor Michael Bloomberg has to go cap in hand to many of the same legislators in Albany who eliminated the tax, urging them to help save the City from severe financial troubles by reinstating the 30-year-old measure which was equal to 0.45 percent of the commuters’ salary and which would have generated an estimated $416 million.

But the repeal of the tax in 1999 by the New York State Assembly and the Senate and the need to reintroduce it aren’t the lone examples of how political expediency and thoughtlessness by many of our elected representatives are hurting New Yorkers, including the hundreds of thousands of Caribbean immigrants who make the City their home and pay their fair share of taxes.

A prime example of the thoughtlessness is the decision by New York State Gov. George Pataki to impose massive cuts in education spending, a move that will hike tuition costs at colleges in the State and City University systems. The reductions in state funding to health facilities and to other social service institutions will also have a painful impact on the lives of the Caribbean immigrants.

Take the case of education.

If figures provided by Charles Barron, chairman of the City Council’s Committee on Higher Education, are accurate the pain being inflicted on students at SUNY and CUNY schools will be unbearable. That’s because it will be felt the most by poor students while derailing their dreams of securing a sound education. It will reduce their prospects for upward economic and social mobility in a country that quite rightly places a premium on higher education.

“Increasing tuition for our city universities places working class neighborhoods, immigrant students and communities of color in jeopardy,” warned Barron, who didn’t spare Mayor Bloomberg from criticism.

“At the new tuition rate, more students will either leave school or worse, leave our City,” he added. This increase is more than a way of obfuscating a tax. It is tantamount to a death sentence for our public educational system.”

While the tuition cuts wouldn’t kill public education, they would certainly undermine its quality and therefore make it much more difficult for immigrants, for example, to attain their cherished goal of improving their lives.

The figures tell an important story.

For instance, Barron stated:

-When Gov. Pataki proposed an $82 million reduction in the CUNY budget and suggested that tuition at City colleges be increased by at least $1000 per student, the net effect is going to be that each student would receive $345 less in services per year.

-New York State already has the 14th highest four-year public colleges and the fifth most expensive community college network in the nation.

-The average cost of tuition and fees for higher education and fees in the state has risen at the astronomical rate of 97 in the last decade of the 20th century. That happened at a time when funding declined by 22 percent during the economic go-go years of the 1990s.

-New York State is ranked the third worst in the nation in its proportion of tax dollars spent on higher education, 12 percent, “even though the national growth has exceed 60 percent in the same period” of the 1990s.

City Council majority leader Joel Rivera put it well when he complained about the Governor’s budget and its effect on the poor.

“Governor Pataki claims that that an eighth grade education is enough to survive in this City,” said Rivera. “Now, he is making it nearly impossible for low and middle income students to obtain an affordable, quality education. I guess he’s following President Bush’s message: leave no millionaire behind.”

That brings us back to the Editorial Board meeting and McCall’s poignant complaint to the Brooklyn lawmaker. The elected official and colleagues in Albany now have a chance to redeem themselves. They can reinstate the commuter tax and put back the money Pataki is cutting from the education budget.

No one is saying that at this time when fiscal problems are commonplace around the country, that some people shouldn’t be called upon to pay more and to operate with less. But to place the burden on the poor while allowing the rich to get off scott-free is both wrong and thoughtless.