ALBANY – New York State’s government is spending at the fastest rate since the days of Governor Rockefeller, according to a new report that threatens to undercut Governor Pataki’s efforts to cast himself as a fiscal conservative as he sets the stage for a presidential run in 2008.

Lawmakers this spring approved a budget that increased spending of state funds by 8.3% versus the prior year, the largest percentage hike in 33 years. In 1973, the final year of Rockefeller’s administration, Albany increased the same type of spending by 10%.

The findings were released yesterday as part of a budget analysis by a fiscal group in Albany. The Pataki administration reacted to the report by faulting lawmakers for spending beyond what he proposed in January.

The Democratic Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver, blamed Mr. Pataki for handing down an executive budget that accounted for most of the increase.

The Republican majority leader, Joseph Bruno, when asked about the study at a press conference, replied with a puckish grin: “It’s good company to be in with Nelson Rockefeller. Those were the good days.” A spokesman for Mr. Bruno later said the Senate’s budget priorities were tax cuts and increasing spending on schools, hospitals, and nursing homes.

Published by the Empire Center for New York State Policy, an arm of the conservative Manhattan Institute think tank, the report found that state funds spending increased to $77.3 billion in the 2006-07 budget year from $69.5 billion the year before. In his executive budget, Mr. Pataki originally called for lifting spending by about $5 billion, or 7.1%, according to the report. The percentage increases cited in the report are adjusted for inflation.

Fueled by a strong real estate market and higher than expected Wall Street profits, state funds receipts increased to $75.4 billion from $71.7 billion the year before, a change of 5.2%. The budget “represents the Legislature basically spending the fruits of the economic growth and then some,” the author of the report and the director of the Empire Center, E.J. McMahon, said.

About half of the extra money in the adopted budget is earmarked for school aid, Medicaid, public health, and higher education. The Medicaid increase – slightly less than $1 billion – is mostly due to a law passed last year that shifted a portion of local government Medicaid costs to the state. The total increase does not include spending approved by lawmakers that Mr. Pataki is blocking for legal reasons. If the governor frees the money – which includes a program giving checks to homeowners to offset property taxes and additional funding for hospitals and nursing homes – state funds would go up by 10%.

The budget increase could put pressure on Mr. Pataki’s successor to stanch the cash flow. Gubernatorial candidates in both parties have criticized the size of the budget and have pledged to restrain spending if elected.

The Republicans in the race, William Weld and John Faso, are proposing budget caps. Mr. Weld, a former governor of Massachusetts, says he wants to limit the amount of state tax revenue spent by lawmakers to the prior year’s revenue total multiplied by the inflation rate, with population growth also taken into account. Mr. Faso, a former assemblyman, wants spending pegged to the growth in personal income of New Yorkers.

Asked to comment on the report, a spokeswoman for the leading Democratic candidate, Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, said in an e-mail that Mr. Spitzer intends to make “the tough decisions necessary to put money back in people’s pockets and renews their faith that their tax dollars are being well spent.” Mr. Spitzer’s opponents have accused him of proposing measures that would make the budget bigger, such as his plan to dramatically expand health insurance coverage.

In a telephone interview, Mr. Faso said yesterday that New York is “one terrorist attack and Wall Street downturn from fiscal calamity.” Asked if he holds anyone in particular responsible for the hike, Mr. Faso said, “I think it’s obvious that the Legislature and the governor are responsible for the state budget.”

Historically in New York, periods of growth in government have been followed by belt tightening. The pace of spending in the last three years of Mr. Pataki’s third term in office resembles the rates of increase during the first three years of Governor Cuomo’s administration in the early 1980s. The pace slowed considerably over the next several years before speeding up again late in Mr. Cuomo’s third term.

Days after taking office in 1975, Governor Carey stood before lawmakers in the Assembly’s chambers and heralded an era of austerity. “Now the times of plenty, the days of wine and roses, are over,” he said, vowing to reduce the size of government, or, as he called it, New York’s “principal growth industry.”