For a governor who got elected by amassing a reputation for standing up for the little guy against Wall Street bankers, Governor Spitzer sure got taken to the cleaners by JPMorgan Chase. Mr. Spitzer yesterday acknowledged that the bank — 2006 profits, $14 billion — was getting a subsidy for its new downtown building of more than $200 million — or more than $25 from every man, woman, and child in New York City.

It turns out that the governor’s acknowledgement may understate the amount of the subsidy, which, according to the watchdog group Good Jobs New York, includes goodies such as a $5 a square foot rent subsidy and a sales tax exemption on things like fancy office furniture for the investment bankers. A press release from Governor Spitzer also announced that the company will get $20 million from something called the “World Trade Center Job Creation & Retention Grant Program.”

We don’t mind saying that we’re as happy as the next person to have JPMorgan in the city, but it’s beyond ridiculous for the taxpayers of this city, already groaning under the largest combined state and local tax burden in the nation, to fork over more than $200 million to a tower full of already prosperous investment bankers to pay them to move from Midtown Manhattan to Lower Manhattan. Let the rest of us keep the $200 million, and let JPMorgan stay in Midtown, would be a fine outcome.

It’s not even as if these public subsidies are being used to prop up a private real estate deal. The landlord who is the beneficiary of these subsidies, via JPMorgan, is the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. JPMorgan has chosen to rent from them rather than from Larry Silverstein, the gutsy landlord who bought the 99-year lease on the Twin Towers when they were “privatized” by Governor Pataki. No doubt the bankers thought they could get a better deal from the government than from another private business. Well, what do you know? They were right.

What the Port Authority, which is supposed to run ports, is doing in the commercial real estate business in the first place is beyond us, other than the empire-building that is characteristic of government entities. It’s not as if the deal meets Mayor Bloomberg’s muchflogged goal of making ground zero a round-the-clock neighborhood rather than a commercial district that is lifeless on weekends and late at nights. Mr. Bloomberg held up negotiations with Mr. Silverstein for weeks, insisting that there be a residential component at ground zero, a component that was ultimately reserved for the site that JPMorgan now wants the taxpayer to subsidize as a bank office building.

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To put the subsidy of $200 million in perspective, consider that JPMorgan Chase’s entire payment in what Mr. Spitzer announced in 2002 as a “historic,” “global” settlement of conflicts of interest in securities research was $80 million. The $200 million subsidy returns that to JPMorgan Chase more than twofold. There may be a genuine, free-market recovery happening downtown. But this deal is really more in the character of a Potemkin village, set up by the government authorities at great expense to create an illusion of progress. It would not be too much to characterize what is going on in New York with special tax breaks as a reverse Robin Hood racket — confiscating property from the unfortunate many and lavishing it on an influential and powerful few, using the government as the instrument. What a turnabout for the one-time sheriff of Wall Street.