New York’s gubernatorial election is less than 16 weeks away, but both Gov. Kathy Hochul and her GOP challenger Bruce Blakeman have largely escaped questions about one of the most substantial tasks New York’s governor will face next year: how he or she will balance the budget.

Because with outlays soaring on the state’s priciest programs — Medicaid and school aid — the state is in dangerous territory.

The spending plan approved in late May, nearly two months after the official deadline, continued Albany’s multi-year practice of hiking expenditures substantially faster than inflation.

Even as the economy, and tax receipts have grown faster than expected, Albany has been spending money as fast as it comes in.

State officials already estimate a $6 billion mismatch between revenues and expenses in the fiscal year that will begin April 1.

That’s far from the biggest budget gap a governor has had to confront, but it’s notable how little people are talking about it — or about the overall shakiness of the state’s financial picture.

State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli this week warned “[i]ncreased spending pressure continues to strain the State’s ability to find structural budget balance and puts into question the State’s future ability to make important investments.”

Hochul early in her tenure squeezed lawmakers into putting aside cash in the state’s reserves to help weather the next emergency or economic downturn. But those funds are smaller as a share of the state budget than they were two years ago, and they are poised to keep shrinking.

Unfortunately, DiNapoli’s reports don’t appear on many summer reading lists: His office had also sounded the alarm about New York City’s slipshod finances last summer.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani ignored him and then was shocked — shocked! — to learn the city had been spending more than it took in for three years.

But these warnings should be heeded.

Ignoring the avalanche of federal aid coming from Washington,About half of state tax receipts are flowing to just two programs: Medicaid, the joint state-federal healthcare program meant to serve the poor and disabled, and aid payments to New York’s costliest-in-the-nation schools.

Medicaid and the Essential Plan, a similar federally funded healthcare program, ballooned in the 2010s. By 2024, they were covering more than 40% of New Yorkers and most New York City residents.

State taxpayers are paying over $48 billion for Medicaid this year, up from $28 billion just five years ago.

People often attribute this to fraud, but most of Medicaid’s cost explosion was lawful. New York’s political class made a conscious choice to make more people eligible for more services and to pay providers more for them.

That, however, makes it harder to discern where the program is being defrauded, thus inviting more fraud.

Medicaid’s structure, which matches every dollar from Albany with at least a dollar from federal taxpayers, created a dreadful incentive to allow, and even encourage, bloat.

Even if every dime of fraud were trimmed away, the program would still spend more than it did a few years ago.

Ironically, the politicians bemoaning “waste, fraud and abuse” the loudest are often the least interested in the nitty-gritty details about how to actually spend public dollars more wisely.

New York’s school districts, meanwhile, once again escaped meaningful scrutiny from Albany this year as senators and assemblymembers of both parties refused to ask basic questions like why New York spends 30% more per student than Massachusetts but falls short in every measurement of student outcomes.

Will New Yorkers hear that question asked some time in the fall? Unlikely.

A good swath of Democrats in the Senate and Assembly is worried he or she will lose their next primary to socialist challengers, and most Republicans are terrified of offending the public employee or healthcare unions invested in the status quo.

Forget the Eastern Bluebird. New York’s state bird should be the ostrich.

Ken Girardin is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute.