Cuomo, a Democrat, stopped short of saying he would renew the surcharge, which affects individuals reporting more than $1 million in income. But after months of putting off the conversation about taxes — except to brag, in speeches, that he has lowered income taxes during his first six years in office — the governor’s comments indicate flexibility going into budget talks.

“Before you do the tax policy you have to look at the numbers and you have to know what you need,” Cuomo told reporters last week after an economic development awards ceremony. “What does the budget look like? How much money do you need to make the budget work? And the fewer tax dollars you need to do government’s job, the better. So the question is, how much money do you need and then you raise taxes to that level.”

“We don’t know, because you have two big variables,” the governor continued. “You have the receipts, which you have a guesstimate on receipts, but the big question is, you don’t know what the federal government is going to look like and you don’t know what they’re going to do with the billions of dollars that come to New York. You need that answer first before you say what you’re going to do on taxes.”

Indeed, the unexpected election of Donald Trump and his stated promises to repeal Obamacare have added billions worth of uncertainty to New York’s budget. And lagging income tax receipts already were making for a tight budget year. As of the end of September, Cuomo’s Division of the Budget projects a $3.5 billion deficit,of which $2.84 billion would be covered with unspecified cuts from holding spending growth of state operations to 2 percent.

The top income tax bracket is now 8.82 percent and will fall to 6.85 percent at the end of 2017. Ron Deutsch, head of union-backed Fiscal Policy Institute, estimates the millionaires’ tax brings in $3.7 billion a year. (The state’s budget is about $150 billion a year.)

“Not only do we need to maintain the ‘millionaires’ tax,’ we should expand it,” Deutsch wrote in an email. “New York will inevitably be facing substantial cuts in federal services and we need to position our state’s finances to be able to weather the rough storm that’s seems to be on the horizon.”

The surcharge was first enacted in 2009 after state revenues collapsed as a result of the Great Recession. Cuomo and state legislators renewed most of the surcharge just before its first expiration date in 2011, but also trimmed tax rates for middle-income New Yorkers. Since lawmakers acted before the surcharge expired, Cuomo spun his move as a tax cut.

This past year’s budget included further trims, pushed by Republicans in the state Senate, to middle-income rates. Democrats who dominate the state Assembly are expected to argue, as Deutsch did, for raising taxes on the wealthy and perhaps creating new brackets to capture higher income earners.

E.J. McMahon, president of the fiscally conservative Empire Center, said Cuomo would do better to find money by canceling a property tax rebate program or rolling back generous tax breaks given to film and television producers.

He along with business leaders — and Cuomo himself — have said that New York’s high tax burden makes it uncompetitive in attracting businesses.