While voters head to caucuses tonight in Iowa, here in New York we’ll have to wait until 2005 for the chance to elect the mayor and city council members who have a big say in determining what local taxes we pay. While that New York City election is more than a year away, it is already starting to affect the behavior of local politicians. Or so we gather from the news of late last week, with Mayor Bloomberg proposing a $400 annual rebate to owners of co-ops and condominiums and of one-, two- and three-family homes. Next, according to a dispatch by Jennifer Steinhauer and Eric Lipton in Saturday’s New York Times, the City Council is considering one-upping the mayor, proposing a permanent reduction in the property tax rate that would apply not just to individuals but also to all property owners — including those who own apartment houses and office buildings.

It was only a year ago that the council and the mayor were debating which taxes to raise and by how much, so it’s a wonderful turnaround now to see them arguing over which taxes to cut and by how much. The politicians at least publicly attribute the change to the city’s improved economy, which has boosted the city’s tax revenues above the projected amounts and improved the city government’s bottom line. But surely the impending election must have something to do with the new attitude.

We say this not to question the mayor’s motives nor those of the council. There are plenty of elitists in this city who are ready to mark the mayor down as engaging in “pandering” (The New York Observer editorial last week) or going “too far in trying to make people happy” (The New York Times editorial of Saturday). But if the influence of an impending election is so deleterious on policy, it’s a wonder the press elitists haven’t proposed doing away with the practice of democracy altogether. What are the politicians supposed to do, try to make the voters un-happy?

This newspaper, for one, is firmly in the camp that sees pre-election tax-cutting as an entirely healthy, even welcome practice — aligning the actions of the city’s politicians with the will of the electorate. It’s an argument for making the mayor and the council run for reelection every year. The politicians might be a little more hesitant to make unpopular decisions like raising taxes if they knew they had to answer to the electorate immediately before the public’s anger had a chance to dissipate. As John Adams put it in 1776, “When annual elections end, there slavery begins.”

That’s not to suggest that unpopular decisions aren’t sometimes the necessary and correct ones, or that voters aren’t at times well served by leaders who try to win them over to support policies that initially meet popular resistance. See John F. Kennedy’s book “Profiles in Courage.” But such cases tend to be the exceptions rather than the rule. Not all unpopular politicians are courageous; some of them just made erroneous policy decisions. The unpopular tax increases imposed over the past two years in New York — whose taxpayers already bear among the largest state and local tax burdens in the nation — qualify as such policy errors, in our view.

The argument is made that a tax reduction for the city now would undercut the city’s requests for aid from Washington and Albany. That’s nonsense. A tax-cutting president, Geo. W. Bush, and the tax-cutting Republicans who control Congress would prefer helping a pro-growth, tax-cutting New York City and would resist propping up a city that is creaking under the burden of a massive tax burden and a socialist-style welfare state.

Anyway, the Bush tax cuts and the economic boom they created have been better for the city than any bailout package. If Albany followed New York City’s lead and started cutting taxes at the state level, it would be better for the city’s economy than any additional state cash aid supposedly undermined by the city’s tax cuts. But the governor’s race in New York isn’t until 2006, so it may be a year or so yet until the Albany crowd catches the tax-cutting spirit that’s spreading in Iowa and even here in New York City.