If you want to have a grim sort of fun, go to the Empire Center online and take a look at the Spend-O-Meter, which keeps track of New York’s spending, according to the 2015-16 budget, in real time.

The first thing you notice are the dollars spinning like pinwheels. Not to spoil the surprise, but the rates are as follows:

• $4,503 per second
• $270,167 per minute
• $16.2 million per hour
• $389 million per day
• $2.7 billion per week
• $11.8 billion per month

Add it up, if you can count that high, and you get to $142 billion, the size of the state’s current budget.

If it were all going for good causes … ha-ha … we can’t even finish that sentence.

Consider the half a million bucks going to a mysterious nonprofit agency in Brooklyn, Relief Resources, that was singled out for scrutiny by the short-lived Moreland Commission on public corruption.

What drew the attention of the corruption commission were the numerous, large state grants being collected by the agency, which is supposedly a mental health services referral provider.

The commission’s investigation could not turn up any services the agency actually provided to anyone, but before conclusions could be reached or charges filed, Gov. Andrew Cuomo disbanded the commission.

We’ve bemoaned before Cuomo’s abrupt dismissal of the commission last year, just as exposure of some of the Legislature’s corrupt practices seemed near.

But how did half a million dollars find its way into the current budget for an agency whose mission and legitimacy were questioned by a commission on corruption?

Half a million bucks is only about two minutes worth of spinning on the Spend-O-Meter.

But the budget has $2.6 billion worth of “lump-sum” spending in “pots” that can be spent at the discretion of the governor, Senate and Assembly. Each one gets certain “pots,” with the governor’s office getting the lion’s share.

“Member item” spending, also known as “pork barrel” spending, was phased out over the past few years, but these lump-sum pots are pork by another name.

Disclosure of the uses of this money is hidden, and therefore, subject to corruption.

When Sheldon Silver needed money for what prosecutors are calling payoffs, he dipped into one of these pots. That money – hundreds of thousands of dollars – went to a doctor who was referring patients to a law firm that was, in turn, funneling cash back to Silver.

Before he got arrested, state Sen. Malcolm Smith intended to distribute cash to a project that would help a developer who had promised to provide money for political bribes. Smith was going to take the money from a lump sum pot for transportation projects.

“The risk of corruption continues as long as decision-making on lump sum pots of funding remains in the shadows,” said Dick Dadey, executive director of Citizens Union, a nonpartisan good government group.

There are reasons to be pleased with the state budget. It increases aid to schools, although not as much as it appears, since the budget also continues the gap elimination adjustment, which takes money from schools to cover other state bills.

It allocates money for worthy environmental projects, like fighting invasive species in Lake George.

But, as with ethics reform, the state budget offers only half-hearted attempts to address longstanding problems. We cannot clean up Albany with half measures.

What we need, above all, is transparency. That means no member items, no lump-sum pots, nothing but a line by line accounting of how every dollar is being spent. The state is collecting a huge amount of money in taxes from us. At the very least, we should know exactly how it’s being spent.

© 2015 The Post-Star