New York’s budget gap is not just a number. It is a number that seems to have more and more zeros behind it every few months, a dizzying figure that has grown so much and so fast that Gov. David A. Paterson is running out of ways to convey his anxiety.

“People like to talk about the weather so that they can avoid talking about what they need to tell you,” Mr. Paterson said at a news conference in Manhattan on Tuesday, as wind and cold rain battered the city. “Imagine outside, the conditions that exist today in New York City are a balmy sunny afternoon in Hawaii. Because that’s what it would compare to — how bad the budget is that I’m about to tell you.”

In fact, the latest projections are so awful that they really do seem like the product of a fanciful imagination. Since the last time Mr. Paterson gave a budget update, in July, the state’s projected deficit over the next three and a half years has doubled — yes, doubled — to $47 billion, the highest in New York’s history, according to officials.

The new gap for the current fiscal year, already half over, is now $1.5 billion, despite cuts made at a special session of the Legislature in August.

In his remarks, Mr. Paterson emphasized that plummeting state revenues were to blame for most of the increased gap. And sure enough, the administration’s estimates show that the travails of Wall Street, drops in consumer spending, and tens of thousands of expected job losses have hurt the state’s bottom line, adding billons of dollars to what were already large budget gaps.

And there are spending increases, which — in keeping with Albany tradition — continue to far outpace inflation. Almost every year, governors and lawmakers plan to spend more money next year.

“It’s hard to say that there is not a revenue problem,” said Elizabeth Lynam, the deputy research director of the Citizens Budget Commission, a group that generally favors fiscal austerity. “On the other hand, they knew last year that the financial picture was changing. They really built their spending on a house of cards last year.”

During the next fiscal year, for example, state officials project a $12.5 billion budget gap. But that assumes that state spending rises by nearly 12 percent. For comparison’s sake, the last time the state spending actually increased by 12 percent or more was in the fiscal year starting in 1984.

While some of the projected increases are the result of more people participating in entitlement programs like Medicaid, others are purely a product of political decision-making. Roughly a third of next year’s expected spending increase, for example, consists of increases in state education aid that are a top priority for the governor and for lawmakers of both parties.

In fact, since the last round of estimates in July, total projected spending for next year actually grew one percentage point. That is because the state now expects to spend $400 million out of a reserve fund to meet new contracts with labor unions.

By contrast, if state spending were held flat next year — an impossibility in some categories, like debt service —the projected gap would be cut by more than half, to about $5.8 billion. If it were held flat for the next three years, that $47 billion cumulative deficit would drop down to something more like $11 billion, all else being equal.

According to an analysis by the Empire Center for Public Policy, a conservative research group, state spending increased by about 40 percent from 2004 through the current fiscal year.

“If they had managed to spend at a slightly slower pace, still above inflation — say, about 30 percent — the total general-fund budget would now be $4 billion lower,” said Edmund J. McMahon, the center’s director.

But numbers are tricky things. For example: zero. That’s the number of new people Mr. Paterson said he would hire at state agencies in July, when, in a strongly worded memo taken as a signal of the governor’s seriousness about the worsening fiscal situation, he instituted a hiring freeze.

According to a report on Tuesday in The Buffalo News, however, roughly 31,684 people have been added to the state payroll since the freeze was declared. The majority of them were professors and teaching assistants at the city and state university systems, which by law have control over their own staffing, while others were seasonal employees, like workers at this summer’s State Fair.

But the new employees also included veterinarians, boxing inspectors and cooks, suggesting the difficulty Mr. Paterson faces in trimming a large and complex state bureaucracy, which has about 200,000 employees — a number that is projected to drop slightly by the end of the fiscal year.

“We also have to ensure, even in tough times, that we have to hire for critical positions for health and safety, such as doctors, nurses, aides, cooks,” said Laura L. Anglin, the state budget director. “These things keep our institutions running, make sure your roads are plowed.”

But something has to give, Ms. Anglin and the governor both indicated on Tuesday. At an emergency legislative session he has called for next month, Mr. Paterson said, “there will be hard and painful cuts. There is no segment of this budget that will not be cut.”

Then again, Mr. Paterson has been warning all year that significant spending cuts would be necessary, while leaders of the State Senate and Assembly have more or less been agreeing all year. A special session in August trimmed only about $600 million.

That is a lot for the summer of an election year; by Albany standards, it was a triumph of bipartisan leadership. And some say that is precisely the problem.

“Now they’re getting closer to an economic forecast that is realistic,” said Ms. Lynam. “What hasn’t been coming around is the spending.”

To try to ease the pain, Mr. Paterson said that he would soon go to Washington to ask for more federal aid. That may have the side effect of delaying tough spending decisions, however, since both the governor and the Legislature will be hoping that Beltway politicians will make up some of the difference that Albany politicians have not.

“I don’t think the Legislature will do a lot to address next year’s budget gap because they’ll want to wait and see what happens on the federal stimulus side,” said James A. Parrott, the chief economist of the Fiscal Policy Institute, a liberal policy-research group. If a lot of that comes from Washington, “that could mean a real benefit to New York State.”

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