Four months after the deadline, and this is what lawmakers come up with?
A $134 billion budget that hikes spending 4 percent — more than double inflation — and socks New Yorkers with even higher taxes?
Maybe they should have just kept on bickering.
Indeed, the plan they OK’d Tuesday will inflict more hardship on the state and aggravate Albany’s already untenable fiscal burden.
Start with the new taxes, about $1 billion worth this year alone (on top of about $10 billion last year).
New Yorkers will feel the pinch in their pocketbooks from the reinstatement of the 4 percent state sales tax on clothing purchases under $110.
But the move will also depress retail business, further erode the economy — and kill more jobs.
Terrific.
And that’s just for starters.
Expect even more devastating economic fallout from the ill-will lawmakers engendered by deferring promised business-related tax credits — to the tune of nearly $1 billion a year through 2012.
No wonder some hedge-fund managers who work in New York but live out of state are still thinking of fleeing, despite Albany’s decision to scrap a planned $50 million tax on them.
After The Post called attention to that tax — and Connecticut Gov. Jodi Rell began courting the hedge funds — lawmakers seem to have had second thoughts.
But the hedgies now fear the plan may soon see daylight again.
And who can blame them?
If lawmakers feel free to renege on those business tax credits, what’s to stop them from hitting up hedge funds down the road?
There’s more: Lawmakers missed a rare chance to make essential structural fixes to the budget and instead borrowed billions (though they deny it) to pay for the new spending — including a raid on the state pension fund.
A reckoning is overdue.
Again, doing nothing might have been better.