Opinion

Larry, Curly and Moe

New York’s spendocracy greeted Gov. Cuomo’s tax-hike coup with qualified high-fives and alleluias yesterday — yes, it had just gotten another $2.6 billion to spread around. But no, that wasn’t going to be nearly enough.

Amazingly, Cuomo, GOP Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos and Democratic Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver stood with straight faces and announced that they were “cutting” taxes.

“Our state government has come together in a bipartisan manner to create jobs, grow our economy and, at the same time, enact a fair tax plan that cuts taxes for the middle class,” Cuomo said, in a joint announcement.

Indeed, they said that “all taxpayers [will] see a tax reduction or no change” — even though their scheme will “generate $1.9 billion in additional revenue for the state.”

Don’t you just love Albany math? No one pays more taxes — but somehow the state pockets a couple more billion.

Not that Albany doesn’t “need” the hikes. With at least one-third of New Yorkers enrolled in one welfare program or another, where’s the cash to come from?

And that, at the end of the day, is the fundamental issue.

Nobody has the guts to even attempt a serious, sustained effort to control spending.

Not Cuomo, who surely knows right from wrong here.

Didn’t he solemnly pledge that he wouldn’t raise taxes? Yes.

And didn’t he break that promise? Again, yes.

Didn’t Skelos take the same blood oath — only to dishonor it as soon as the heat was turned up?

Of course he did. And when we asked him why, he was dumb as a post.

A guilty silence, we presume.

So make no mistake: All that new money showering down on Albany will do nothing — nothing — to correct its structural budget imbalance.

Indeed, the deal leaves a $2 billion gap for the coming year, and billions more worth of red ink down the line.

What tricks do Cuomo & Co. plan for next year — yet more “tax cuts” that magically raise revenues?

One thing’s for sure: This year’s sophistries won’t protect them from the special-interest parasites driving the tax hikes.

Billy Easton, head of the teachers-union front Alliance for Quality Education, demonstrated that yesterday.

“We are concerned that $2 billion in revenues does not fully address the $5 billion hole created by the elimination of the existing millionaire’s tax,” he whined. Easton demands the state restore “damaging and inequitable cuts” to schools.

And that’s not all: “The demand for fairness and opportunity does not end today,” he made clear. “We need to ensure that revenues are adequate to the needs [of] our schoolchildren.”

(And to support the $346,000 pay packet of teachers-union boss Richard Iannuzzi, though Easton didn’t get into that.)

Fact is, neither Cuomo nor Skelos — and certainly not union-owned Silver — have the courage, the cleverness or the discipline to bring spending within New York’s constrained means.

Tax hikes are all they know, or are capable of — that much became clear yesterday.

And wait ’til next year.

It’ll be worse.