NEW YORK, Aug. 7 (Xinhua) -- Bill de Blasio, Mayor of New York City, Monday unveiled a proposal for a "millionaires tax" to help fix the city's beleaguered subways.
The plan would tax city residents with annual incomes of more than 500,000 U.S. in order to raise money for the subway improvements of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), de Blasio said at a press conference at the city's Brooklyn Borough Hall.
The roughly 0.5-percent income tax hike would apply to the roughly 1 percent of the city's taxpayers would generate about 800 million dollars annually, and it would also fund reduced-price MetroCards for low-income riders.
The mayor called for lawmakers of the New York State, which runs the MTA, to pass the proposal "so the rest of us can live our lives here in the city."
Joseph J. Lhota, MTA Chairman rolled out a nearly 1-billion-U.S.-dollar emergency subway repair plan late July, promising to put the brake on nightmarish delays and derailments of the subways within one year. He suggested the city and the state split the cost evenly.
New York's subway has long been the lifeblood of the city. However, the number of subway delays partly due to the aging infrastructure tripled in the past five years, to 70,000 per month, according to a report last month. About 5.7 million people take the subway on an average weekday.
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