A generation ago, when Massachusetts voters were fed up with high local taxes, they did a simple thing. By a margin of 59% to 41%, they approved a statute called Proposition 21/2, which capped local property taxes at 2.5% of total property values and capped the annual growth in each municipality’s tax levy at 2.5%. Thirty years later, New York is waking up to the logic of that idea.

Governor Paterson, saying he has come to see the wisdom of setting a limit on how much a school district can tax its residents, is submitting to lawmakers a bill that would prohibit districts from raising property taxes by more than 4% in a given year unless they receive permission from slightly more than half of voters in an override election. “We have to implement a property tax cap now,” Mr. Paterson said.

A cap was the chief recommendation of a special state commission headed by Nassau County Executive Thomas Suozzi, a Democrat who has emerged from his defeat by Eliot Spitzer in 2006 to become one of New York’s most valuable policy thinkers. The Suozzi proposal is hardly revolutionary compared to Proposition 21/2, as it is higher and would apply only to school property taxes, which represent only 60% of property taxes and an even smaller fraction of local taxes.

The teachers union is nonetheless in full battle dress, vowing that the Massachusetts revolution won’t spread to New York. And the union may be right. It wasn’t the general court, or legislature, in Massachusetts that passed Proposition 21/2 but the people, in a referendum, who were won by a powerful taxpayer association, Citizens for Limited Taxation. No comparable organized force against the rise of taxation exists in New York — at least not yet.

Instead, what we are about to witness is an Albany classic. The speaker, Sheldon Silver, will try to avoid any direct conflict with the governor. He’ll say he’s open to the idea of a cap but will furrow his magnificent eyebrows and express reservations about the impact a cap might have on the “schoolchildren.” He might offer an alternative plan that raises the cap so high it becomes pointless or link it to an income tax hike that he knows will be accepted neither by the governor nor the Senate.

So over a period of months, the governor’s proposal to cap property tax increases will die a slow death under the cover of debate. Senator Bruno, whose desire to placate his conservative base is overridden by his fear of antagonizing the teachers, will pretend he supports a cap but will spend not a single ounce — not even a mote — of political capital pushing the Assembly to join him. Mr. Paterson, careful not to behave like his petulant predecessor, will gently scold the Legislature and say he tried his best.

The reason why a cap is such a dangerous idea in Albany is that it would force state lawmakers to deal with a problem of their own creation. Public education is expensive in New York because of high labor costs, which themselves are the consequence of labor-backed state mandates that given the teachers unions tremendous leverage over contract negotiations. Lawmakers don’t want to anger voters, so they spend billions of tax dollars giving homeowners subsidies, which is just encouraging school districts to collect more taxes.

Mr. Paterson smartly scraped away other recommendations made by Mr. Suozzi. The county executive’s idea for a circuit breaker — which would give grants to lower-to-middle income homeowners when their taxes consume a certain percentage of their income — isn’t tax reform but just another sop to suburban homeowners at the expense of New York City residents. As a whole, New York City residents don’t stand to gain a lot from a cap since the city relies much more heavily on income taxes for its revenue. But the cap is good policy and may even pay dividends years from now if it encourages state lawmakers to tackle the problem of the high cost of education.

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If there are heartening elements to all this, they are that there are the stirrings of a property tax fight in New York, that two Democrats, Messrs. Paterson and Suozzi, are in the vanguard, and that our new governor, though he came out of the legislature, understands the problem. We have been critical of him on some issues, but he clearly has an open mind in respect of policy. More than that, one could even suggest that he has been liberated in his new office to try daring policies. The ineffectiveness of Mr. Spitzer’s governorship clearly weighs on him. We would but add that just as forcefulness can be easily confused with bullying, so can civility with weakness. The burden will be on the governor now to figure out a way to press his case. Millions of property tax-paying New Yorkers will be rooting for him if he means what he said when he said yesterday: “You’ve only seen the first act. You haven’t seen the grand finale.”