The surcharge revenue could be used to reduce many of the proposed cuts, or to avert the worst of them. For instance, Mr. Cuomo wants to withhold a $1.2 billion payment due to poor school districts under a 2006 court order. If the Legislature agrees, it will be the second year in a row that the ordered payment is not made. And it will further widen an already unconscionably wide gap between rich and poor school districts.

Extending the surcharge would allow the payment to be made. Even then, K-12 education would still face a crushing 7.3 percent cut from last year’s spending. If it is combined with Mr. Cuomo’s wrongheaded idea for a property tax cap, many schoolchildren will suffer educational setbacks from which they — and the New York economy — may never recover.

If it were not so serious, Mr. Cuomo’s antitax crusade would be silly. His claim that New York has “the worst business tax climate in the nation, period” is based on an index from the Tax Foundation, a research group, which rates South Dakota and Alaska as the best states. New York is clearly not at a competitive disadvantage to those states. And neither is at a disadvantage to its neighbors: what Mr. Cuomo does not say is that New Jersey is ranked 48th on that list and Connecticut 47th.

More important, taxes generally rank behind education, infrastructure and other criteria when businesses decide where to locate and invest. If Mr. Cuomo were really concerned about the needs of business, he would seek to reduce proposed cuts in areas that businesses care about most.

The surcharge is not the only place to look for needed revenues. A penny-per-ounce tax on sugary sodas could raise an estimated $465 million in the first fiscal year. A review of the state’s nearly $29 billion in annual corporate tax credits and other breaks could yield hundreds of millions of dollars in credits that have outlived their usefulness.

Calling for painful spending cuts, it turns out, is the easy part. Calling for relatively painless tax increases requires real political courage, which Mr. Cuomo and state lawmakers have yet to display.

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This is part of a series of editorials about the fiscal crisis in New York State and in other states around the country. You can read all of these articles at: nytimes.com/fiscalcrisis.