THERE'S NO WAY around it: the budget bloodbath in San Francisco this year will be as ugly as it's been since the bad old days of the late 1980s and early 1990s, when there was never any money for anything and the words "budget crisis" became a permanent part of the civic vocabulary. We're hearing numbers like $170 million as the current shortfall. And when the state cuts are finalized, and cities like San Francisco get squeezed even more to cover Sacramento's red ink, the situation will get ever bleaker.

Some of the San Francisco supervisors have promised to do everything possible to avoid cuts to the Health Department, and Mayor Willie Brown seems to have reached a compromise with the city-employee unions that will avoid wholesale layoffs. But by most accounts, important city services – even some vital services – will have to be reduced.

So the mayor has asked every department to look at a 10 percent budget cut, and the Board of Supervisors' Budget Committee is holding hearings to ask department heads how they would pull that off.

So let me throw out a radical idea that's at least worth thinking about. Perhaps the Budget Committee should prepare a list of tax increases and new revenue sources that would raise all of the money the city needs to avoid any service cuts at all.

I'm not saying we should solve the entire budget crisis with new taxes. (Actually, I'd love to say that, but the ability of cities to raise taxes in anything but regressive ways has been sharply constrained by state law.) And there are probably some places (say, the airport runway office) where cuts are an excellent idea.

But we ought to be looking at all the options here. If the lowest-income people of San Francisco are going to bear the brunt of the budget cuts, then we ought to be looking at making the wealthy share as much of the pain as possible. Frame all the decisions as a trade-off: we could raise the real estate transfer tax (which affects people buying property, generally a better-off segment of the population) or we could reduce hours at the libraries and run fewer Muni buses (which hits hardest on people who generally are on the less-well-off part of the spectrum).

Then take Sup. Aaron Peskin's suggestion to heart, and hold hearings on completely revising the city's business-tax structure, so that in the future some of these choices won't be quite as hard or ugly.