Yesterday, we wrote that New Yorkers were eagerly awaiting Eliot Spitzer’s plan for tackling their notoriously high state and local taxes. Now, after much heaving, he’s released his plan and, well, we’re still waiting. Mr. Spitzer has unveiled a scheme that “works” mainly by expanding the existing School Tax Relief, or STAR, program. He would pay for the $6 billion in tax relief by squeezing $10 billion in savings out of other parts of the state budget.

Mr. Spitzer seems to be trying to play copy-cat in respect of his Republican opponent, John Faso, in whose own approach to taxes STAR expansion plays a prominent role. The attorney general also appears to want to ape his Democratic opponent, Thomas Suozzi, in suggesting that tax relief should be achieved by finding savings throughout state government. But in key respects, Mr. Spitzer’s plan is just a pale imitation of those offered by the other candidates.

Expanding STAR, as we’ve noted before, has its own problems. The program only redistributes income tax revenues to property-tax payers instead of tackling the spending excesses that drive the taxes in the first place. If anything, it leads to even higher property taxes over time because it insulates voters from the full effects of higher school spending, easing political pressure on school boards to contain costs. Although Mr. Faso calls for more STAR, he nonetheless seems to understand this dynamic, and his program would include caps on school spending, as well as changes in existing laws that would allow school districts to operate more efficiently.

Any specific proposal for controlling school costs is glaringly absent from Mr. Spitzer’s plan. In addition to a general cap, Mr. Faso has identified specific factors, like the union-friendly Wicks Law and Triborough Amendment, that drive up costs and has vowed to eliminate them. Mr. Spitzer deals only with the revenue side of this problem without doing anything to restrain the demand for school tax monies. A failure to enact spending limits when STAR was first introduced has brought us to the current pass, and Mr. Spitzer doesn’t appear interested in doing anything to solve that problem.

Like his Democratic primary opponent, Mr. Spitzer has opted to focus on government-wide cost savings in service of tax reduction, but again he falls short compared to the competition. Mr. Suozzi’s five-point taxpayer savings plan is noteworthy for its courage, identifying specific steps he would take even when those steps risk running afoul of his party’s powerful union base. Mr. Suozzi promises to reduce the state workforce to 172,800 from the current 192,000 over three years and to create a new pension tier for future hires as a way of tackling a major looming fiscal problem in the state.

Mr. Spitzer has prepared an Excel spreadsheet to itemize savings, but details are still vague. He calls for a 7.5% reduction in non-personnel services costs, but doesn’t say how he would achieve that. He says he would save $350 million over three years through “Medicaid longterm care reform,” but says only that he would do that through “expanded longterm care insurance” and “improved care management.” Does he mean that, in order to restrain excessive Medicaid spending, he’d be willing to take on the unionized nursing home workers of Local 1199?

That Mr. Spitzer is even talking about tax relief is a step in the right direction, a capitulation of sorts to the sorely aggrieved taxpayers of the state. But he has given no inkling that he will address – or even thinks about – the most important question in the tax debate, how to cut taxes in a way that maximizes incentives to work and produce in New York State. This is the supply-side question, the art of crafting tax cuts so that they kick in on the next dollar earned. This largely has to do with taxes on income and capital, and we predicted that the candidate who seizes that issue is the one to watch in the coming months.