“It is time to cut spending, cut taxes, and encourage New Yorkers to earn more, save more, invest more, and create more jobs. … These dollars do not belong to the government. These dollars belong to the individuals who earned them. We will not so much be cutting taxes as protecting people’s right to keep the fruits of their own labors.”

Those bracing words, spoken by Governor Pataki in his first State of the State speech 10 years ago this week, ring as true today as they did back then. Mr. Pataki would do well to repeat them, or something very much like them, when he delivers his 11th annual address to the Legislature tomorrow afternoon.

No prescription would do more to cure what ails New York – its sluggish economy, its anemic population growth, and, yes, its crumbling infrastructure and inadequate schools – than putting Albany on a low-tax diet.

Some will object that the state has a $6 billion deficit, with big bills coming due for public schools, Medicaid, and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, and therefore cannot afford to cut taxes. Yet Mr. Pataki inherited a $5 billion deficit when he first took office – larger than the current gap, proportionally – and still succeeded in pushing through a 25% cut in state income tax rates while also balancing the budget.

The public school monopoly, the health care industry, and others who drink deeply from the government trough will try to argue that even the slightest attempt to cut spending, or even control its growth, amounts to an assault on children in school, patients in hospitals, and grandparents in nursing homes. They will call for hiking taxes lest any of these vulnerable citizens slip through the safety net.

Mr. Pataki can remind them that raising taxes itself is a kind of assault, on the livelihoods and liberty of hard-working New Yorkers – not to mention their children and grandparents. As he put it so eloquently in 1995, “We will not so much be cutting taxes as protecting people’s right to keep the fruits of their own labors.”

He could also mention that his tax cuts ushered in the unprecedented economic expansion of the late 1990s, which not only created hundreds of thousands of jobs but generated billions in extra revenue for the state coffers. The Pataki prosperity simultaneously lifted people out of the safety net and paid to strengthen its fibers.

Unfortunately, the Pataki prosperity also caused the governor to drift away from the clear-eyed, pro-growth policies of his first years in office. Rather than finally driving a rosewood stake through the heart of the Vampire State, he bought his way into the favor of the teachers’ unions and the health care unions and the public employee unions with multibillion dollar nosegays.

Those spendthrift years not only undermined his reputation as a fiscal conservative, they also cost him most of his credibility with the Legislature. The final blow came during his re-election campaign of 2002, when he approved a budget he should have known the state could not afford, scoffed at warnings of the red ink to come, and then, a week or two after Election Day, owned up to the threat of a massive deficit.

Fatefully, in that same plebiscite, voters trapped by Mr. Pataki’s content-free campaign returned 103 Democrats to the Assembly, giving Speaker Sheldon Silver a veto-proof majority in the 150-member lower chamber. The next January, Mr. Pataki returned to his first-term ways and presented a budget that cut spending and avoided raising taxes. But the Legislature took the bit in its teeth, approved massive hikes in income and sales taxes to avoid spending cuts, and overrode all of Mr. Pataki’s vetoes.

Given this history, the governor will not have an easy time preventing the Legislature from raising taxes again this year – let alone persuading them to cut taxes. Yet he enters the lists with a shiny new coat of armor courtesy of the Court of Appeals, which recently upheld the governor’s sweeping budgetary powers under the state constitution. The court essentially ruled that lawmakers can add to or subtract from the governor’s recommended dollar amounts but may not change the substance of his proposal. This decision, if fully exercised, gives Mr. Pataki enormous leverage to bend the Legislature to his will.

It sometimes appears that Mr. Pataki has lost his enthusiasm for the good fight. Some denizens of the Capitol are operating on the conviction that it will take a new governor, in the person of Eliot Spitzer, now the attorney general, to whip state government into shape. But Mr. Spitzer may prove less intimidating once he forfeits the power to subpoena and indict, and New York State cannot afford two more years of fiscal insanity. So right now it’s up to Mr. Pataki, a proven tax cutter, to get back to work.