Spitzer's Latest Flop

A day after announcing he was giving up on his plans to issue drivers licenses to illegal immigrants, Governor Spitzer is giving up on another bad idea, his effort to enforce the sales and use tax on purchases from Amazon.com and other Internet retailers with no physical presence in New York. The Amazon Tax, first reported yesterday on our front page and in this column, was supposed to extract an extra $100 million a year from the pockets of New York taxpayers and channel it to the politicians in Albany and city hall. And just in time for the holiday shopping season.

We suppose it is an improvement that Mr. Spitzer only let this bad idea dangle out there for a day, in contrast to the license plan, which he allowed to drag on for weeks and weeks. It's great that Mr. Spitzer is learning to cut his losses, but at a certain point you have to start wondering about why these ideas are making their way onto front pages in the first place, rather than being shot down before they become state policy.

Mr. Spitzer has degrees from Princeton and Harvard, but he wouldn't be the first Ivy League-educated genius to fail in the real world. The latest Siena Poll shows his job approval rating at 33%. If there's any consolation for the governor, it's that another personally wealthy New York politician with a Harvard graduate degree also saw his approval ratings plummet into the low 30% range early in his first term in office. Now that politician, Mayor Bloomberg, has a serious shot at achieving Mr. Spitzer's longtime ambition of being the first Jewish president. If Mr. Spitzer can only figure out how to give up on bad ideas before announcing them as state policy, he may yet have his own chance at becoming a comeback kid.