The New York Times — while ceaselessly editorializing against what it calls President Bush’s tax cuts for the rich — has already managed to wring from the city what the advocacy group Good Jobs New York describes as an $18.7 million subsidy in the form of special tax breaks for its new headquarters tower on Eighth Avenue between 40th and 41st streets. A news article in the Times itself estimated the tax breaks and subsidies at $26.1 million. These are mainly job “retention” benefits, as if the editor and publisher of the Times were about to move their offices to New Jersey were it not for the special tax breaks.

Now the Times and its partner in the plan for a new headquarters tower, developer Forest City Ratner, are going back to the government for more tax breaks. This time, the tax breaks could amount to as much as $170 million. This time around, the application is for benefits under a 2003 state law aimed at cleaning up “brownfields.”

The law found “that there are thousands of abandoned and likely contaminated properties that threaten the health and vitality of the communities they burden.”These sites, the law says, are “known as brownfields.”

Yet the site for which the Times wants the brownfields tax break for was hardly “abandoned,” at least until the Times, Forest City Ratner, and their government partners got into the picture. The city government and the state’s Empire State Development Corporation condemned 11 buildings and parking lots, home to 55 businesses, to make room for the New York Times’s new tower. Some of these businesses were perfectly vital, as was the rest of Times Square well before the 2003 law.

The purpose of the brownfield law is to “level the playing field between green fields and brownfields, where prohibitive factors would inhibit development,” a spokeswoman from the Department of Environmental Conservation, Maureen Wren, told us. That’s why environmentalists lobbied for seven years to get it enacted. The point was to “reverse blight in urban communities” by targeting sites where “toxic contamination is an impediment to redevelopment,”a senior research associate at the New York Public Interest Research Group, Laura Height, said.

Whatever toxic contamination there is on the Times site, it wasn’t inhibiting development. The newspaper chose to develop the site in 2000, well before the current brownfield law was passed.

One can’t blame the Times Company for trying to seek all the tax breaks for which it might be eligible. That is the duty its executives have to the shareholders. But it might be an illuminating example for the Times editorial writers. They oppose broad-based tax relief for all taxpayers. In the rare instance that the Times editorialists do support tax reductions, they tend to favor policies that target tax breaks toward some sort of socially useful goal, like keeping jobs in New York or cleaning up polluted lots. But these programs have a tendency to get exploited by the politically powerful and well-connected. Big businesses like the New York Times Company pay lower taxes, while Times editorial writers cheer on the taxand-spend politicians who impose on ordinary taxpayers here the highest state and local tax burden in the nation.

If the state Department of Environmental Conservation approves the application now pending for tax breaks for the Times headquarters, it would be making a mockery of the description contained in the state law’s findings. There’s a better way to spur development, whether in Times Square or a real brownfield.