Governor Paterson was in Manhattan yesterday to speak at a breakfast of the Association for a Better New York, and it sounded as if his speech had been written by a cabal of New York Sun editorial writers. Seriously, we haven’t heard such an on-target explanation of the problems facing New York — and of the potential solutions — since we last got off the phone with E.J. McMahon of the Manhattan Institute.

“The budget that was presented to me was too big and too bloated. It had somewhere between a 4.8 to 5.1% growth in our state economy,” Mr. Paterson said, according to a copy of his remarks on the governor’s Web site. “How much more foresighted would it have been to have addressed a budget growth on the inflation rate about 2 to 2.5, rather that a budget a rate that ballooned out a lot of our revenue forecasts and our expenditures.”

The governor spoke of an astounding reduction in revenues from the state’s 20 largest taxpayers. By the third week in March of 2007, they had paid in $533 million. This year, they had paid $72 million — just 14% of the revenue from the prior year.

“The first thing we have to do is tighten our belts and be far more fiscally sound and prudent in terms of the revenues that we are spending,” Mr. Paterson said. He spoke of friends he had in New York who had moved to Texas, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina, explaining that while they loved New York, “they couldn’t pay the taxes.” He spoke of African-Americans fleeing New York for South Carolina, Alabama, and Georgia, and of Puerto Rican families leaving East Harlem for Paramus and Edgewater, N.J.

The governor spoke of how programs developed to address the flight of jobs and individuals from the state had failed, of how “enterprise zones” became “the most glorified discretionary member items in New York state history.” He spoke of the absurdity of the STAR program, a rebate for property taxpayers. “Sending back rebates to individuals who are hoodwinked and cajoled into thinking that 5% of the money that they sent to the state got sent back them, and somehow they’re supposed to be happy about it is patently ridiculous,” he said.

He spoke of the 640 public authorities in this state, “only 11 of them regulated by the public authority control board. Maybe we should find out what the other 629 do, because they consume billions of your and my dollars every year in taxes.”

Said Mr. Paterson, “This is the kind of hard core cutting that we need to do in our budget next year, so that we can cut 5 to 10% off the top, and not balancing the budget on those who need services, on the middle class, or people who are lucky enough to make a million dollars.”

It is one thing for a columnist or an editorial writer or a think tank analyst to talk this way, and another thing for a governor to talk this way. And it’s one thing for a governor to talk this way, and yet another thing for a governor to actually follow through on it by vetoing excess spending and by exposing himself to attack from special interest groups by proposing specific spending cuts.

If Mr. Paterson proceeds to govern along the lines he outlined yesterday morning, he’ll have plenty of support, and may yet make the leap from an accidental governor to an elected one. More importantly, people may stop fleeing New York and start coming here from places like Texas, Nevada, Pennsylvania and North Carolina to help the state grow. For what Mr. Paterson really nailed in his speech yesterday was the vision of individuals, not as sources of congestion, greenhouse gases, or traffic taxes, as Mayor Bloomberg and his allies at the Partnership for New York City and in the environmental movement have sometimes seemed to look at them recently, but as assets in creating opportunity in a better, more prosperous New York.