While New Yorkers have been all wrapped up in the debate over tax increases at the city and state levels, another tax debate is unfolding at Washington. It has to do with the size and structure of tax cuts. Part of this has to do with the differences between New York and Washington. The federal government is allowed to run a deficit, while, by law, New York city and state budgets must balance. Another difference is that in Washington, both houses of Congress and the White House are in the hands of Republicans. If New York Republicans, instead of Democrats, controlled the City Council and the State Assembly, it’s hard to imagine that New Yorkers would be facing tax increases, though the “leadership” of such partisans of the current tax hikes as Mayor Bloomberg and Senator Bruno is a bit discouraging.

Governor Pataki’s performance has certainly been better than that of Mr. Bruno or Mr. Bloomberg, but Mr. Pataki might pick up a trick or two by studying Mr. Bush. The president started by asking for a $726 billion tax cut. The size estimates are for 10 years, and accounting for lost revenue is always an imprecise art, because of the difficulty of accounting for the revenue impact of the economic growth that might result from the tax cut. In any event, the key particular here is that Mr. Bush proposed a tax cut. Mr. Pataki, on the other hand, merely proposed to hold the line against increases in “job-killing” taxes, going along with revenue enhancers of his own, including an increase in the sales tax. After the inevitable compromises, Mr. Bush will almost certainly get some sort of a tax cut, albeit a smaller one than he originally proposed. Mr. Pataki, on the other hand, looks like he’s about to see on his watch an increase in job-killing taxes.

With yesterday’s resignation of Mr. Bush’s director of the office of management and budget, Mitchell Daniels, there’s going to be a lot of talk about how the White House economic team is in “disarray.” But the Beltway crowd often loses sight of the fact that the most important players aren’t the aides but the politicians who actually got elected. Like Mr. Bush. “He’s focused like a laser beam right now on the economy,” said one appointee who often travels with the president, Hector Barreto, who is administrator of the Small Business Administration.

Mr. Barreto stopped by the editorial rooms of The New York Sun the other day and made a pitch for the president’s tax plan. He pointed out that Congress had already passed the tax cuts that Mr. Bush now wants to accelerate. There’s a wide consensus that the tax cuts will help the private sector create jobs, he said; those trying to whittle down the size of the president’s tax-cut package seem to be arguing, “Let’s not create that many jobs,” Mr. Barreto said, adding quizzically, “What’s that about?”

One can argue about the size and shape of the Bush tax-cut plan compared to that voted out yesterday by the Ways and Means Com mittee. The Ways and Means plan cuts the capital gains tax. It is one of our favorite taxes to cut; the 1997 reduction in the capital gains tax helped trigger the economic boom of the late 1990s. The Ways and Means plan also taxes dividends and capital gains at the same low rates, which have more logic than the Bush plan, which would have made dividends tax-free while leaving the capital gains rate untouched. As these columns have argued before, the problem of double taxation would be better dealt with by eliminating the corporate income tax than by eliminating the tax on dividend income for individuals.

All these are details — important details, but details nonetheless. In the long view, Mr. Bush will deserve credit for leading the way toward federal tax relief. Given the way New York state and local tax bills are about to skyrocket, New Yorkers’ need for tax relief is going to be an issue of growing explosiveness.