Sacramento Assemblyman Darrell Steinberg is considered to be one of the Legislature's more thoughtful members, genuinely interested in making policy with positive, long-term consequences, such as his crusade for more affordable housing.

It's a bit disconcerting, therefore, to see Steinberg spearhead a late-blooming legislative effort to rewrite state and local tax policy with the evident motive of affecting the Oct. 7 election at which voters will decide whether to recall Gov. Gray Davis. It would be not only an expedient and crassly partisan move, if successful, but one that could destabilize already chaotic state and local finances even more.

Steinberg proposes to repeal the huge increase in property taxes on cars (vehicle license fees) that the Davis administration imposed a couple of months ago under pressure from Steinberg and his fellow Democrats, and offset it with boosts in cigarette taxes and income taxes on high-income Californians. If the $4 billion tax swap was evenly balanced with no net increase in overall revenues, Democrats believe, it could be done with a simple-majority legislative vote, and Republicans could not block it.

If the maneuver wouldn't produce any more money for the public treasury, what's its point? It would be a purely political act: voiding the car tax boost, which is a major factor in voter anger that fuels the recall drive, and substituting other taxes that relatively few Californians would pay, thereby lessening the political fallout.

Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante, the only major Democratic politician running to replace Davis should he be recalled, has already endorsed the swap and if it's enacted, he could tout it as his idea, thereby gaining traction with voters as he vies with actor Arnold Schwarzenegger and dozens of other would-be governors. The most recent polls have Schwarzenegger running ahead of the pack, with Bustamante a distant second.

Steinberg, of course, denies harboring Oct. 7 motives. "This would be Democrats taking the lead to get rid of what is by everyone's agreement a very unpopular fee and substitute it with something that is more palatable to people while keeping the state and local governments whole," Steinberg told the Los Angeles Times.

Davis originally proposed to raise income and cigarette taxes to balance the state budget but not fiddle with the unpopular car tax, whose bite had been reduced by two-thirds in previous years. But he also wanted to end the "backfill" of state payments to local governments to make up their losses in car tax revenues. That generated strong resistance among Democrats, who pressured Davis to reinstate the full car tax and thereby maintain revenues to local governments. He finally acceded to the pressure in his revised budget and his administration pulled a "trigger" to reinstate the vehicle levies. The final version of the budget contains no other new taxes, thanks to solid opposition from Republicans, but relies heavily on additional loans to cover a multibillion-dollar deficit.

If the Steinberg tax swap were to be superimposed on the situation, it would be not only an expedient political move but one that could have adverse long-term consequences for both state and local governments.

The car tax may be unpopular, but it's a very stable source of independent revenue for local governments. Cutting it again and reinstating the "backfill" from the state would make local governments increasingly dependent on yearly handouts from Sacramento, which has generated endless rancor in years past.

Filling the hole with higher income taxes, meanwhile, would increase the volatility of the state's revenue stream and increase the risk of more feast-and-famine budgets in the future. Everyone connected to the deficit-plagued budget agrees that a major factor is that the state has become inordinately dependent on income taxes on a few thousand affluent taxpayers, whose personal incomes, in turn, are highly dependent on the stock market's performance.

The Steinberg proposal would make highly volatile income taxes an even larger component of the state-local revenue stream. It's not the sort of thing that a thoughtful legislator concerned with long-term consequences should be doing.