Today’s executive budget from the Bloomberg administration will be something of a moment of truth. After months of playing chicken with Albany and with the municipal unions, Mayor Bloomberg must choose between making the cuts with which he has threatened the unions or continuing to beg Albany for his cherished commuter tax. For the sake of New York’s economy, and the future fiscal health of this city, it would be best if Mr. Bloomberg picked the former and forewent the latter.

Mr. Bloomberg certainly owes no debt to the municipal unions that would stay his hand. As a self-financed candidate, and an ostensible Republican, he certainly does not have the unions to thank for his election — or to count on for his reelection. And the unions, during this mayor’s fiscally troubled time in office, have not budged on his request for them to come up with $600 million in savings — aside from ridiculous suggestions such as lending the taxpayers their own money, out of the unions’ pensions funds, at an exorbitant interest rate.

Instead it seems the mayor is animated by a belief that the city cannot afford to cut services more than the slight trims already made, even if avoiding additional service cuts would require onerous tax increases. The mayor has already boosted property taxes by 18.5% and now wants to pick commuters’ pockets. But why the mayor thinks that New Yorkers would prefer tax increases to service cuts is a mystery. These columns have outlined a series of ways to close the budget gap without either cutting services or raising taxes.

As the mayor well understands, and has expressed an appreciation of recently, low taxes foster economic growth. The bottom of a recession is hardly the time to hit property owners and businesses — the ones dependent of those commuters who allegedly cost the city so much — with excessive levies. Yet this is what Mr. Bloomberg does as city revenues continue to lag behind the administration’s projections. Meantime, Democrats scheme for an income tax surcharge on the already overtaxed wealthy, leaving the district attorney to propose a public safety tax to fund law enforcement — something New Yorkers were under the impression they had already paid for and that certainly should be the last thing the mayor cuts.

Indications are, as reported at page 1 of today’s New York Sun, that the mayor will not rise to this occasion. Instead, he will submit a budget full of scary stories. Doomsday contingency budgets — such as more than 1,300 police officers cut, one in six sanitation workers gone, all after-school programs cancelled — are a ritual in New York. The 5,000 lay offs the mayor is likely to implement regardless of Albany’s actions are to be commended, though they are but a down payment at this late hour. Even assuming that the city gets the $200 million in federal aid Mr. Bloomberg counted on in his January budget, that money plus less than $500 million in agency spending reductions only adds up to about 20% of the $3.4 billion gap-closing plan. That leaves 80% still spectral.

With the unions refusing to play ball, the Bloomberg administration strategy seems to be to lay a potential repeat of the 1970s at Albany’s feet. Albany does cause its share of problems for the city. Mandating excessive spending on Medicaid is one of them. But not raising taxes on the city’s workers is one of the few things that Albany does that truly benefits our city.