WITH Democrats controlling the Senate in Albany for the first time since 1965, Sen. Malcolm Smith and his conference last month approved a 9 percent spending hike and $8 billion in new taxes and fees, including a $4 billion income-tax hike.

In addition, a passel of ultraliberal bills that formerly would’ve stood no chance of passage now is on the brink of being enacted.

Here’s a sample of what the party is pushing in the last days of the Senate session:

A bill that would force businesses with three or more employees to pay equal wages for “equivalent” work. (That’s not the same as equal work, for which equal pay has been mandated by federal law since 1963.) The jobs could be as different as a truck driver and a secretary, but the pay would have to be the same if they had a similar “composite of skills, effort, responsibility and working conditions.” This vague language — and the fact that it would be the government, not the marketplace, defining if jobs are “equivalent” — would invite employees to sue and give businesses another reason to flee the state.

Senate Democrats are poised to join the Assembly in gutting one of the most important tax-incentive programs for economic development by imposing a “living wage” requirement on any business that receives city, state and federal tax benefits from an Industrial Development Agency.

New York City, where the cost of doing business is much higher than in other metropolitan areas, relies on companies receiving these discretionary benefits as part of its effort to attract industrial and commercial investment and spur job growth.

The bill would mandate that every employee working at a building developed with IDA tax-exempt bonds, for example, be paid at least a “living wage,” which is defined as the median hourly wage for all occupations in the metropolitan area. The result is that developers — and most other business — would lose money by accepting the benefits. “It’s tying a hand behind our back in the competition with other states,” says a senior economic-development official.

The effort could punch a major hole in the Bloomberg administration’s budget. Without the IDA payments in lieu of taxes, the city may have to dip into its own pockets to repay the bond holders who are financing the expansion of the No. 7 subway line.

Senate Democrats see it differently. “It’s not a plausible reason not to accept money because they don’t want to be held to a higher standard,” says a spokesman. In other words, the Democrats seem to be arguing, businesses should apply for the tax breaks even if the terms don’t make economic sense.

At the same time, Senate Democrats are advancing a batch of bills that together would result in one of the largest expansions of welfare since the 1990s reforms. One bill would prevent the city from requiring that single, childless adults who receive food stamps work at least five hours a week. Another would force welfare offices to steer recipients — even ones who’ve never worked a day in their lives — toward “sustainable wage” jobs. For a single mother with two kids, that comes to about $17 hour.

City officials say the bill not only would drag out welfare payments for much longer periods, but would lead to litigation against social-services districts perceived as not trying hard enough to place people into those jobs.

Another bill would allow the personal doctors of welfare recipients claiming disability benefits to overrule the city’s independent medical assessments. The Bloomberg administration, for good reason, fears the change would lead to “doctor shopping” and encourage fraud.

Democrats also want students on welfare to be allowed to count homework and class hours as work, promoting even further the notion of welfare as a no-strings-attached entitlement.

Says E.J. McMahon of the Manhattan Institute: “All of these bills are clearly meant to undermine the core premise of welfare reform: that welfare is transitional and the single most important thing you can do is get people to work.”

Senate Republicans, meanwhile, are standing back. “Look,” they’re saying. “We weren’t so bad.”

Republican leader Dean Skelos and his party may think the best course is to allow the Democrats to trash the state’s economy. They’re assuming voters would then turn to the GOP in desperation. That may be the case. But voters may also ask: “What did you do to stop it?”

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