Cariduitku

New Yorkers are consumed these days by their elected officials’ expense accounts.

We’ve learned that while former Gov. Eliot Spitzer spent a fortune hiring high-priced prostitutes, he frugally dispatched one woman from New York to an assignation at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington on the cheaper regional train instead of splurging on the Acela. Gov. David Paterson just got around to reimbursing his campaign’s American Express platinum card account for two stays, five years or more ago, at a Days Inn on the Upper West Side — a hotel where he carried on an extramarital affair and was billed $253 for two nights (compared to the Mayflower, where the cheapest double starts at more than $400).

Full details of these transactions and others may yet yield a trove of additional insights into the character of the two governors. But, meanwhile, another public official has all but gotten a free pass over one aspect of his personal finances: Nobody outside Michael Bloomberg’s tight inner circle knows how much he spent not running for president.

We don’t know how much his non-campaign cost.

We don’t know who got paid — or for doing what.

Nor, under the law, are we entitled to.

Campaign financing experts say Bloomberg is under no legal obligation to disclose his expenses because, as a self-made billionaire, he never solicited contributions from anybody else. He never formally declared that he was even exploring, much less embarking on, a presidential campaign.

Now, nobody is claiming that Bloomberg spent his money improperly.

But if a byword of accountability is to follow the money, where does nondisclosure leave us in a year when we’ve parsed the campaign financing filings of the other candidates even to compare what they’ve spent on doughnuts?

If you are what you eat, or what you wear, aren’t you also what you spend?

With Bloomberg, we’re talking about a guy who invested $160 million on his two mayoral campaigns, more than either Hillary Rodham Clinton or Barack Obama reported spending so far on running for president.

We’re talking about a guy who recently gave $500,000 to Albany Republicans — ostensibly to help them retain their tenuous grip on the State Senate, but, perhaps, also as an unspoken incentive to approve the mayor’s congestion pricing charge for motorists entering Manhattan.

What’s $500,000 to Bloomberg?

That’s how much extra he spent in a single afternoon — on Election Day 2001 — when last-minute polling suggested he needed to galvanize every one of his potential supporters.

To Bloomberg, spending $500,000 is comparable to a measly millionaire shelling out a mere $100. That much would buy you a dozen drives into Manhattan once congestion pricing is imposed, but not even a full night at a Days Inn.

The mayor has sort of revealed the recipients of his generous and influential philanthropy. But when I asked Stu Loeser, his spokesman, for an accounting of Bloomberg’s national political expenses, he replied: “No thanks. We decline to comment.”

Campaigning is expensive.

It was humanizing to hear that in 2001, when Bloomberg was still trailing his chief mayoral rival by double digits, he confided to his pollster: “I’m already in this race for $20 million. When do I start to move?”

Four years later, Bloomberg barely winced when his re-election campaign invested more than $10 million on developing a computerized database that included sophisticated psychological profiles of New York City voters.

After that election, a spokesman responded to criticism of Bloomberg’s record campaign budget by suggesting that the mayor had gone beyond the legal requirements in revealing what he spent.

“The Bloomberg campaign is disclosing the same financial information, in the same publicly accessible format, as all other campaigns,” the spokesman said, “even though we are not accepting taxpayer money.”

In 2005, though, unlike 2001, Bloomberg was required to make such disclosures to the city’s Campaign Finance Board.

If, as his spokesman seemed to suggest, he was voluntarily doing the public a favor back then, why not now?