House budget writers now say they could finish putting their spending plan together as early as next week and are still adamant that it will include no new revenue and will instead cut almost $4 billion out of the budget, $2 billion more than the reductions proposed by the Senate.

The budget passed last summer by the General Assembly came to $21.3 billion. The House budget expected next week will total $17.5 billion, the lowest since 2005, prompting realistic fears that the House cuts will decimate public schools and end services to thousands of people who rely on them.

Officials in the Department of Health and Human Services say House leaders have asked them to come up with $800 million in budget reductions beyond the $1.2 billion the Senate cut. The House education target is $1.1 billion less.

That doesn't seem to bother House Minority Leader Paul Stam, who said things weren't so bad five years ago, that "we were able to fund essential state services. The sky didn't fall."

That effectively defines the position of the anti-government legislators and the market fundamentalist think tanks that support them. They seem to welcome the economic crisis. It's an opportunity to slash the government they despise.

Stam says the state was doing fine in 2005 and doesn't see any reason why we can't spend the same amount this year. That widely misses the point, as the House budget targets would reduce per capita spending to levels not seen since the early 1990s and much further back as a percentage of personal income in the state.

But even using Stam's flawed methodology, cutting the budget back to 2005 levels is absurd. Here are a few reasons.

Since 2005, not including the current fiscal year, the budget has spent $328 million to educate the roughly 80,000 new students that have shown up at school. We could ask them to leave.  

Teachers have received raises of ranging from 5 percent to 8.8 percent in an effort to keep salaries within shouting distance of the national average. State employees have received raises from 4 to 5 percent.

The budget has repaid $65 million to the state retirement system and deposited another $80 million in one year to keep the plan in decent financial shape.  We could take it back out, if it's even in there.  The State Health Plan received $110 million in 2007. Might be hard to move that back to 2005 levels.

The state could fire all 54 of the school nurses funded in 2007, or ask people that adopt children or become a foster parent to send back in the increased payments they have received.

The budget in the last few years has created more crisis services for the mentally ill and built a new mental hospital to replace ones that are crumbling. We could tear the new hospital down and ask for our money back and let the patients fend for themselves.

Recent budgets have helped more at-risk kids, lowered class size in early grades, hired more prosecutors, counselors for victims, and other court personnel. We could layoff assistant district attorneys, leave victims on their own and increase the crowding in the already overcrowded court system.

The list goes on and on. No matter how excited Stam is to budget like it's 2005, it is four years later and the state has grown, the needs have increased, and commitments to families and the mentally ill and victims of crime have been made.  

Simply longing for a return to past year's spending levels is not a reasonable policy position, it is an ideologically-driven attempt to shrink government, regardless of the cost to schools, human services, and criminal justice system.  

It's now 2009 and millions of people in North Carolina are struggling. Let's raise enough revenue and pass a budget to help them.