“We’re not going to raise taxes.…The governor doesn’t want to. The speaker doesn’t want to. The people don’t want them.” These were the words yesterday of the majority leader of the state Senate, Joseph Bruno. Few New Yorkers are going to read his lips. They’ve said one thing and meant another before. “The one thing we’re not going to do is raise taxes,” Mr. Bruno said in January after Governor Pataki’s budget address. We all know how that turned out — with Mr. Bruno and the Assembly’s speaker, Sheldon Silver, conspiring in the spring to impose, over the governor’s veto, an income tax surcharge on wealthy New Yorkers and a quarter-point increase in the state sales tax.

Those tax increases were paired with extensive borrowing and budgetary smoke-and-mirrors to close a $12 billion budget gap. And Senator Bruno broke his promise without anything in the way of spending cuts. There doesn’t seem to be much reason to think things will be different this time around, with a budget gap estimated at about $6 billion. With all 212 members of the state Legislature facing an election in November 2004, Albany is even less likely to cut programs that are either popular or aimed at vocal interests. They may also be reluctant to raise broad-based taxes, but this wouldn’t preclude another soak-the-rich scheme like the one from earlier this year or an increase in taxes on businesses.

Certainly, as our William F. Hammond wrote on this page last month, the business community is bracing for such an assault.”Our assumption all along has been that advocates of higher spending and higher taxes will return in force in the next session,” a spokesman for the Business Council of New York State, Matthew Maguire, told The New York Sun. “We were successful last year in fighting off the ‘New Jersey plan’ of corporate tax increases.…But that idea is like a weed. It returns.” Proposed tax increases may be pitched as “closing loopholes,” but they will be tax increases nonetheless, forcing businesses to pay more and making the state a less attractive place.

Earlier this year, the tide turned when the state’s most powerful union, the health-care union 1199/SEIU, descended on Albany. Tens of thousands of members were bused in March to the capital for one of the largest demonstrations the town has ever seen. Mr. Bruno got the message. He donned a tie of purple and yellow — the union’s colors — and spoke of the union’s president, Dennis Rivera, as a brother. Instead of joining with Mr. Pataki in his concern over “job-killing taxes,” Mr. Bruno talked about avoiding “jobkilling spending cuts.” It’s hard to remember a more cynical turn by a politician who knows full well that it’s taxes that kill jobs — not spending that creates them. So New Yorkers will be forgiven if they take Mr. Bruno’s tax pledge with a grain of salt and keep a weather eye out for another betrayal of a pledge of “no new taxes.”