The 7.2% growth rate that the Commerce Department has measured for the American economy in the third quarter of 2003 is stronger than anything ever achieved under President Clinton’s boom. It is being attributed by President Bush to tax cuts. “The tax relief we passed is working,” Mr. Bush said yesterday, according to the Associated Press. “We left more money in the hands of the American people, and the American people are moving this economy forward.”

And it stands to reason. The tax reductions on capital gains and dividends, along with the accelerated reductions in personal income tax rates, were signed by President Bush on May 28, 2003. These were pushed through by President Bush and the Republican Congress over the objection of Democrats like Senator Schumer and Senator Clinton, who voted against them. Every major Democratic presidential candidate wants to roll back these tax cuts.

New York City took a different approach to the recession. Mayor Bloomberg, in cooperation with the Democratic City Council and enabled by lawmakers from both parties in Albany, raised income taxes and property taxes. The result? While the national economic news is stunning, New York’s economy still feels stuck in the doldrums. “The State’s decline was centered in New York City,” New York state’s chief economist, Stephen Kagann, said in a September statement commenting on August employment data. “Most of the New York contraction was concentrated in New York City,” Mr. Kagann said in an October statement commenting on September’s job losses.

If you’re wondering why, here’s a likely explanation: It’s in New York City that taxes were raised most aggressively at the margins on the wealthy earners that create the most jobs. What the federal government has done to promote economic growth by cutting taxes, New York’s politicians have done their best to undermine by raising taxes.

This is the fruit of the labors of Mayor Bloomberg, Council Speaker Gifford Miller, and the members of the City Council and the state legislature who looked at the problems of the city and reckoned what needed to be done is to raise taxes on homeowners, commuters, and earners at the top margins. These policy decisions have an effect

When it comes to the economic turnaround, in New York City, “there are a whole slew of businesses that haven’t seen it,” the president of the Manhattan Chamber of Commerce, Nancy Ploeger, told our Yael Kohen, whose dispatch appears at page one. “The full effect of an expanding economy is not being fully felt here in Brooklyn,” the president of the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce, Kenneth Adams, said.

If New York wants to get the full benefits of the economic recovery now underway nationwide — instead of lagging behind it — our politicians could begin by studying what President Bush achieved in the past year. We made this point repeatedly during the run-up to the election that returned Governor Pataki to Albany for a third term. The governor finally began to embrace President Bush’s thinking in the great showdown with Speaker Silver and Senator Bruno.

President Bush, moreover, clearly comprehended what he was doing, as Jerry Boyer makes clear in the adjacent columns. The reason that this growth spurt is happening, he writes,”is that Mr. Bush cut taxes. And when that didn’t work, he cut taxes again.” The underlying point, he writes, is that “the amount of wealth created by a nation is directly related to its level of economic freedom.”

Our politicians seem to believe that these principles don’t apply in the Empire State and in New York City. It will pay to examine the how local figures contrast with the national trends, which are being driven, as Mr. Boyer reports, by increases in investment, both with respect to businesses, which are up 14% and residential, which is up more than 20%.

The next time you encounter your city council speaker or your mayor, your assemblyman or your local council member, as him why New York City isn’t enjoying the kind of boom being recorded at the national level. It’s not the fault of partisan elections. It’s not the fault of the attacks of 9/11. It’s the fault of policy errors that didn’t have to be made.