MAYOR BLOOMBERG NEEDS TO STOP IT ALREADY! FIRST HE RAISES THE COST OF CIGARETTES TO $9.25 A PACK! NOW HE'S GOING AFTER ALCOHOL!

Getting drunk in New York could get more expensive.

The Health Department is mulling a new tax increase on alcohol - which supporters say would make New Yorkers drink less and get healthier.

"It's one of the things on the menu," said Executive Deputy Commissioner Adam Karpati, who oversees the Health Department's alcohol policy.

And it could put a big siphon on a party budget.

Under one scenario, a bottle of Bud would skyrocket as much as 10 cents - taking the fun out of happy hour.

That plan would bump the total tax on a beer to more than 17 cents, a steep fee on a $2 longneck, while a bottle of Cabernet would climb up to nearly 50 cents.

Booze-imbibers are already pumping big tax bucks into city, state and federal coffers.

New Yorkers pony up 7.4 cents of taxes on a bottle of beer, 36.9 cents on a bottle of wine and $3.61 on a standard 750-ml bottle of hard liquor.

The state raked in $206 million off alcohol last year - and that was before Gov. Paterson increased wine and beer taxes to help balance the state budget.

The city taxes only beer and liquor, not wine, raising $23.5 million.

Mayor Bloomberg hasn't weighed in on the idea. But he is a big fan of raising taxes on cigarettes and sugary sodas to improve health - so higher booze taxes would fit right in.

"The surest pathway to changing behavior is through the wallet," Bloomberg said last month.

Former Health Commissioner Thomas Frieden was working on the idea before President Obama picked him to head the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Columbia University's Joseph Califano.

"It's a terrific idea," said Califano, president of the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse.

"This has the potential to be one of the most significant things that Bloomberg can do in terms of the public health."

Frieden was replaced by Commissioner Thomas Farley, who wrote in 2005 that "the simplest and single most effective step we could take to cut drinking is to raise prices by taxing alcohol more."

The city counted 1,700 alcohol-related deaths in 2008, and wants to reduce high school drinking by 16% and booze-fueled hospitalizations 19% by 2012.

"We need to be doing more around alcohol. This is a reasonable thing to consider," Karpati said. Any city increase would need approval from state lawmakers in Albany.

The Citizens' Committee for Children of New York called for the 10-cents-per-drink hike in alcohol taxes, which would flood $500 million a year into tax coffers.