Now that a state judge, Leland DeGrasse, has issued an order demanding the taxpayers of New York State cough up an additional $23 billion – that’s right, billion – for the government-run schools of New York City, one person on the spot is Attorney General Eliot Spitzer. A Democrat, he is the lawyer who would handle an appeal for Governor Pataki. It was Mr. Spitzer who failed to win over Mr. DeGrasse in yesterday’s ruling. Because Mr. Spitzer is running for governor in 2006, he could be the one stuck with making drastic state tax increases or spending cuts in order to lavish additional funds on a school system that is already lavishly funded. Mr. Spitzer had argued to Judge DeGrasse that the spending plan the judge approved yesterday “would award more money, more quickly, than it could be efficiently spent.” The judge dealt with that not at all. Maybe Mr. Spitzer’ll have better luck on the stump.

Also on the spot is another Democratic politician, Fernando Ferrer, who is on the board of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, as is his political consultant, Luis Miranda. Mr. Ferrer is running for mayor, and if $23 billion has to be raised as a result of yesterday’s ruling, it would deserve to be called the Ferrer Tax. Let the politicians running against him tune their megaphones. To put it in context, the entire New York State budget last year was about $90 billion. Mayor Bloomberg, the Republican running against Mr. Ferrer for mayor, might seize the opportunity to use this issue for political advantage against Mr. Ferrer, using Mr. Spitzer as Democratic cover, but, in an astonishingly boneheaded blunder, the mayor issued a press release yesterday that began by hailing Judge DeGrasse’s decision as “another historic victory for New York City’s public school students.”

What is the mayor thinking? New York’s schools are already among the best funded in the nation, and they spend on each student about twice what it costs the Catholic school system in New York to achieve better results in terms of measurable student achievement. Those Catholic schools are closing by the dozens in the face of competition from a giant competitor – the government-run schools – that is operating with a huge government subsidy on the order of $15,000 a year for each student, a subsidy that will only be further increased if Judge DeGrasse’s order is implemented.

CFE and its partisans insist that the state aid formula has underfunded New York City, favoring well-to-do suburbs. We don’t take that issue lightly. But corrections have already been made, and there are political solutions short of a court-ordered $23 billion spending increase. Besides, this particular equity lawsuit, in contrast to some other states, has been built less on reasoning comparing New York City’s school funding with that of the suburbs than on the simple argument that the state has failed in its obligation, under the state constitution, to provide a sound basic education. Had the court ordered vouchers rather than $23 billion in additional spending, maybe some of those now proclaiming victory would better understand what a bad idea is, as Mr. Spitzer put it, the governor and the legislature being “compelled by the courts to exercise their discretion in a particular manner with respect to matters within the sphere of their assigned powers.”