After months of telegraphing their intentions, Governor Pataki and Mayor Bloomberg yesterday unveiled their plans for a $1.50-a-room tax increase on tourists in New York City. By the logic of these two Republicans, taxing hotel rooms is supposed to create more tourists.

Far be it from us to second-guess the city’s hotel owners, who have come out as a group in favor of the tax increase and who presumably know better than anyone what is good for their business. And we’re glad to see that the proposed tax increase has gone down from the $2-a-room increase that was initially being discussed. But, as the adjacent chart shows, even the $1.50-a-room tax increase, if implemented, would put New York at the highest tax of the country’s top 10 convention cities.

The tax-raising Republicans magnanimously promise that after raising $500 million to pay for the expansion of the Javits convention center, the new $1.50-a-room tax will be lifted. In the unlikely event the politicians make good on that promise, they’ll no doubt attempt to label it a tax cut.

The point here is not to oppose an expansion of the Javits Center. If some private company wanted to buy up the land on the West Side of New York and build a convention center, it’d be fine with us. What troubles us is that Mr. Pataki and Mr. Bloomberg — two Republicans who have already saddled New Yorkers with the highest combined state and local tax burden of any city in the nation — want to saddle the public with an even greater burden.

The tax will affect not just hotel owners and visiting conventioneers, but New Yorkers with families who visit here from out of town and stay in hotels. It will affect companies who pay to house employees visiting New York from other sites. In other words, it makes the cost of living and doing business in the city — already steep — even more expensive.

The tax-and-build plan announced yesterday for the West Side of Manhattan is so big that it is worth dividing into parts. Beyond the hotel tax increase and the Javits Center expansion, there is a plan to cover up the Long Island Rail Road yards and build a stadium for the Jets, a professional football team that is now based in New Jersey.

The president of the Jets, Jay Cross, who rang us up yesterday, makes a persuasive case that the $600 million in public funds that would join with the $800 million that the Jets are putting toward the project does not amount to a subsidy of his football stadium. Of the $600 million,$400 mil lion is for a platform over the rail yards, which would have to be built for anything to go on that site. The other $200 million is for a retractable roof on the stadium for a convention center that the city and state want because they say it would generate more year-round economic activity around the site and around the city than an openair stadium would.

Mr. Cross says that $800 million is more than anyone else has spent on a stadium. He says that undermines the argument that his team is accepting some kind of subsidy. In fact the Washington Redskins built a new stadium that opened in 1997 and cost $180 million, and the New England Patriots built a new stadium that opened in 2002 and cost $325 million. Why it costs twice as much to build a stadium in New York as it does anywhere else is a question for another editorial, but let’s just say that the Greater New York Building and Construction Trades Council is an enthusiastic supporter of the stadium project.

Mr. Cross said that were the Long Island Rail Road to move, the Jets would be happy to pay for the real estate and the stadium entirely with private funds. To which one can only say that by far the best outcome would be for the state to sell the rail road and its land to the highest bidder and let the new owner negotiate a private real estate deal with the Jets.

For all that, we don’t mind saying that we find it encouraging that the Jets and the Nets basketball team, which is also based at New Jersey, are trying to find a way to move back to New York. It’s a good sign for the city. If the stadium can help the city win the Olympics in 2012, the television revenues will help fund even more parks, sports facilities, and housing that will leave a positive legacy.

That Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Pataki are trying to generate large-scale construction and real estate development projects in the city is also encouraging. Too often, neighborhood opposition, environmental regulations, and concern about traffic conspire to stop development in New York City before it gets off the ground. Mr. Cross reels off a list of big projects — Lincoln Center redevelopment, the Second Avenue subway — that have been talked about for years without getting done. If Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Pataki can make this stadium, with $800 million in private investment, happen, they’ll have our grudging admiration. If they can make it happen without raising taxes, and by using free-market principles and private enterprise rather than big-government spending, our admiration would be ungrudging.