Admirably, Mayor Bloomberg’s preliminary budget for the next year, released Tuesday, does not include any new tax increases on city residents. We hope that Mr. Bloomberg displays some of his legendarily flinty toughness and stands his ground on the tax question in light of Governor Pataki’s budget address yesterday. Sure, the mayor is set to rake in the 18.5% property tax increase he pushed through the City Council last November. And sure, the mayor is still pleading with the governor to institute a tax hike — or as the mayor prefers to call it, a tax “restructuring” — on commuters. And no one could forget the mayor’s notorious $1.42-a-pack tax on cigarettes, the smoking of which will soon be prohibited in the city’s restaurants and bars (not to mention jails). But, without Mr. Bloomberg holding steady, even all of these levies taken together might not be enough to stave off the calls for tax hikes that are likely to gain momentum in light of Mr. Pataki’s less-than-generous state budget.

Don’t get us wrong. Mr. Pataki’s budget is audaciously austere, and we could hardly hope for better in terms of forgoing tax increases and trimming spending. But the upshot of Mr. Pataki’s thrift is that the mayor’s budget now looks as outdated as Trent Lott’s majority leader stationery. For instance, Mr. Pataki’s budget cuts $724 million in aid to city schools. The governor is also pushing to cut $1 billion from Medicaid, which might save the city some money but could also cost it money by reducing revenues at city-run hospitals.

The governor is also standing strong against Mr. Bloomberg’s request to reinstitute the commuter tax at more than five times the rate of the tax before it was abolished, an item he was counting as a $1 billion gain. Even if Mr. Bloomberg could wrestle a reinstitution of the commuter tax at its old rate of 0.45% out of Albany, the Manhattan Institute’s fiscal policy expert, E.J. McMahon, estimates this would generate but $500 million at most. Count that as a $500 million to $1 billion hole in Mr. Bloomberg’s preliminary budget. Another hole may well be found in the goal of $600 million in efficiency gains from the city’s municipal unions, an item that was included in the November modification and as of yet hasn’t borne much fruit. “He continues to imply that the unions will come around and see things his way out of the goodness of their hearts. They’ve never been known to do that,” Mr. McMahon told The Sun recently. “I just don’t see anything in his strategy that would give him any leverage against them.” Mr. McMahon faults the mayor for not considering contracting city services out to the private sector, a move that has forced union concessions in the past. Nor has Mr. Bloomberg made a credible threat of layoffs, preferring to promise that services will not be cut.

Given these problems, Mr. McMahon worries that, “An income tax surcharge for city residents is all but inevitable.” It would be serious over-reach. The better strategy is to find serious savings in the city’s budget and its workforce, combined with deregulation of the city’s economy in every possible area. There is, after all, a well-established pattern linking the raising of taxes to the destruction of jobs. The city is at a juncture where it needs all the incentives possible for economic growth. If Mr. Bloomberg doesn’t retreat from the anti-tax position he outlined in his budget this week, he might just win back some of the support from the Republican base that has lately been expressing such dismay with his policies.