Governor Pataki has, in his last days in Albany, brought down upon himself the wrath of some New Yorkers, especially those who sit in the State Senate, for his decision to veto more than $1 billion in what are being called “tax cuts.” Resounding apathy would be a more appropriate reaction. After all, most of them aren’t really tax cuts. The vetoed item most dear to upstate Senate Republicans, an expansion of the School Tax Relief, or STAR, program, isn’t what anyone outside Albany would recognize as a tax cut. The only discernable tax cut in the bill, the child tax credit, had been diluted so drastically in its trip through the capitol that it is less an incentive than an insult.

The governor’s move looks rather erratic at first. He’s in his last year in office, and although over his tenure he has pushed through some notable tax cuts, spending restraint has always been difficult and, on balance, he hasn’t earned a reputation as a protector of the fisc. Meantime, he is laying the groundwork for a presidential run in 2008, and it is not hard to imagine the advertisements in the primaries accusing him of vetoing “$4 billion” in “tax cuts.” That’s the estimate of the value over two years of the two programs along with some other, smaller, tax measures.

There’s more than meets the eye, however. First, the governor claims that the tax provisions he’s vetoing may represent both unconstitutional tinkering with the executive budget proposal and shoddy legislative drafting. One section of the STAR expansion as passed could, if taken literally, actually eliminate the entire program. If Mr. Pataki’s constitutional assessment is correct, his could be the last word on some of these provisions since a legislative override would be out of bounds, meaning that the legislature will have to negotiate with him anew to come up with an acceptable compromise.

Beyond that, the move may best be seen as a bargaining strategy. The true oddity of this budget season proved to be that the governor and the allegedly Republican majority leader in the Senate, Joseph Bruno, didn’t disagree on key elements of the governor’s budget, such as the $500 education tax credit. Because Mr. Bruno was desperate to shore up his party’s upstate base with a STAR expansion, he wasn’t willing to stare down the Speaker of the Assembly, Sheldon Silver, whose party lusts for tax increases at every turn.

Mr. Pataki has now given Mr. Bruno an opportunity to face down Mr. Silver, if the Messrs. Pataki and Bruno can manage to work together despite their strained relationship. In his veto message, the governor noted that as written in the budget, the watered down tuition tax credits would have lacked any punch as an education reform. Mr. Bruno can demand that Mr. Silver accede to real education tax credits, take a second shot at expanding STAR in a way the governor would accept, and perhaps even lift the charter school cap. No doubt Mr. Bruno would be all too prepared to offer help overriding the governor’s spending vetoes on programs like Medicaid that are dear to the hearts of Mr. Silver’s supporters in the healthcare unions and not covered by the governor’s constitutional argument.

If that is the goal, then it will only go to show whence Mr. Pataki’s real problems with fiscally conservative primary voters will come. The cruel joke on New York taxpayers is that this latest standoff revolves around only $3 billion in what is, post-veto, a $112 billion budget. The oddity is not that the governor is vetoing tax cuts ahead of a Republican primary but that he’s bothering to veto anything at all. “He’s already accepted the worst of the spending,” the Empire Center’s E.J. McMahon says in respect of the governor’s machinations on the budget. If he were serious about the kind of fiscal discipline that makes conservative Iowans swoon, vetoing $11.2 billion in debt to fund capital construction in city schools would have been a start.

There’s more than enough blame to go around in Albany, and we don’t want to sound unduly harsh toward the governor. In the best case scenario, he would have been hindered by the capital’s entrenched big-spending culture. An unusually severe appendicitis took him out of commission at a key point in the budget negotiations. Even weren’t the governor’s relationship with Mr. Bruno so frayed, the majority leader’s obsession with delivering a budget that is on-time instead of responsible would have made him an unreliable ally against Mr. Silver. If the vetoes can salvage a meaningful education tax credit and force the legislature to lift the charter cap, this week’s exercise will have been worthwhile. Taxpayers will have to wait for wiser leadership in Albany for spending restraint and tax cuts.