The budget that Mayor Bloomberg presents today will be at least $46.4 billion, our Dina Temple-Raston reports today. The recession that hit New York over the past few years and the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks meant contraction for the household budgets of many New Yorkers and the business budgets of many firms based here. But $46.4 billion for fiscal 2005 is a healthy increase from the $41 billion the city spent in fiscal 2001, the last year of the Giuliani mayoralty.

We don’t mean by this to belittle the efforts the Bloomberg administration has made to rein in spending. Firehouses have closed. Nor do we mean to belittle the need for some more city spending on police to defend the city from terrorist attacks. While such a defense is most successfully mounted by the military and intelligence services overseas, and while such costs should be ultimately borne at the federal level, some additional spend ing on security in the city following September 11 is only prudent.

Still, the early indicators in Mr. Bloomberg’s budget suggest that the city has yet to fully come to terms with the spending habits that have made New York the city with the highest state and local tax burden in the nation. Ms. Temple-Raston reports, for instance, that “a law aimed at eradicating lead paint in the city’s older buildings may also run several hundred million dollars for fiscal 2005. Early estimates put the cost at $265 million, though aides say that figure has been revised.”

There are those who will no doubt argue that it is worth spending $265 million to prevent the lead poisoning of a single child. It’s unclear, however, that spending these millions will do that in this case. If the city owned less property, its lead-abatement costs would be less, and its property-tax base would be greater. Mr. Bloomberg has made some strides in selling off the high-end brownstone that once housed the city’s schools chancellor. But it’s only a symbol of the vast privatization that could be done in New York.

Ms. Temple-Raston further cites an aide as saying the budget includes a $200 million city subsidy for its public hospitals. While other health care systems, like that run by the Catholic Church and the federal Veterans Administration, are closing hospitals that lose too much money, the city of New York persists in the hospital business, where it competes against many fine private, not-for-profit hospitals. Why not close the city’s hospitals and let NYU, Columbia-Presbyterian, Beth Israel, Lenox Hill, Roosevelt and the rest compete for the business of treating the city’s sick? One of them should be able to figure out a way to do it that doesn’t lose $200 million a year.

The mayor’s presentation today is also set to include some discussion of his proposed $400 property tax rebate to homeowners. Ms. Temple-Raston reports that in his slide show today, the mayor will boast that seniors with less than $24,000 in income will receive $400 from his tax-rebate plan and only $153 from the City Council’s property-tax rebate plan. Another slide claims that a Queens homeowner would get a $49 tax rebate from the City Council’s proposal, while the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel would get about $344,000.

In our view, one of the reasons the voters elected a billionaire mayor is that they hoped that, at tax time, he would recognize that the owners of the Waldorf-Astoria, to cite the example in question, are creating jobs in the city and paying an outsized share of taxes. But the reason all New Yorkers are paying such high taxes is that we have a city government that, after years of Republican mayors, is still oversized.