‘This budget spends too much and it reforms too little. “That is how Governor Pataki described the plan approved by the New York state Senate and Assembly this week. He’s right. The legislative leaders estimate the spending in the newly approved budget at $101.3 billion, and their pattern is to underestimate, by billions of dollars, the cost of the laws they pass. The spending for the previous year, after adjusting for some items that really belonged in the budget for two years before that, was $95.5 billion. So there you have it: Albany lawmakers increased spending to $101.3 billion from $95.5 billion, an increase of 6.1%. That’s more than twice the annual rate of inflation. If their pattern of underestimating their own spending holds, the true increase could be 8% or 9%.

Who is going to pay the bill for all this new spending? The taxpayers of New York, who, by numerous independent surveys, already bear the highest combined state and local tax burden in all of America. The new budget extends a sales tax on clothing that the lawmakers had promised would expire. It’d be one thing if we taxpayers were getting something really exceptionally good in return for all these high taxes and high spending. But the spending doesn’t seem to have produced much in the way of results.

Take education, one big expense. The State University of New York system isn’t as good as such powerhouses as the universities of California, Michigan, and Texas. Primary and secondary schools in New York produce worse results – that is, lower standardized test scores and graduation rates – than do the schools in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, which spend less money.

Another big expense for the state is health care. This latest budget, rather than reining in such costs, authorizes an additional $250 million in borrowing to subsidize hospitals through the state dormitory authority. This is being done in the name of paying for “efficiency,” but it’s hard for us to see how borrowing more money to add to already generous state subsidies encourages “efficiency.”

Ordinary voters are starting to understand this. A Quinnipiac poll of 1,161 New York state registered voters, released this week, shows only 26% approve of the way the state legislature is handling its job, while 57% disapprove.

This is an opportunity for Mr. Pataki going into the Republican National Convention. Vetoing the spending increases and pressing for further tax cuts would reinforce his reputation as a fiscal conservative. Mr. Pataki would hardly be the only winner. The real beneficiaries would be the state’s taxpayers, who are long overdue for a chance to be winners.