The speaker of the City Council, Gifford Miller, wants to roll back the entire 18.5% property tax hike that Mayor Bloomberg and the council instituted last year — but only for senior citizens. It’s a classic Democratic maneuver, targeting tax cuts — like the federal child tax credit — and using them to segment voting blocs and play at class warfare. Here’s a novel idea: How about a property tax cut for everyone with taxable property? This isn’t as politically advantageous to Mr. Miller, who has his eye on the mayor’s office, but it is certainly fairer.

A council official estimated that with $50 million out of the $110 million “windfall” in tax revenues reported Wednesday, the city could exempt 90,000 one-, two-, and three-family homeowners and 48,000 co-op and condo owners who are seniors with less than $30,000 in income. These people might save several hundred dollars in a year. More equitable is the proposal Council Member David Weprin says is under consideration, a 1% trim of the tax across the board. Owners of one- and two-family homes would save only about $21 under that proposal, but more people would be seeing relief.

One has to wonder, however, just what the game is here. A small bump in tax revenues isn’t going to solve all of our fiscal problems. Budget monitors project a deficit of between $2 billion and $3 billion in 2005. Mayor Bloomberg said city expenses were running higher than forecast as well. He doesn’t seem eager to start cutting taxes, despite his professed interest in the idea. If the property tax is cut a bit, it seems likely the revenue will just have to come from somewhere else this year. Neither the mayor nor the City Council has yet given any indication that they are ready to do what it would take to really lower taxes: shrink the size of New York City’s government.