The state constitution assumes that the governor and the Legislature will pass one state budget each year, and that's the way it worked for many decades.

It's been proposed from time to time that the state go on a two-year budget cycle that coincides with the Legislature's biennial sessions, on the theory that it would result in more comprehensive and forward-looking fiscal plans.

However, the Capitol has been going the other direction in recent years as governors and lawmakers wrestle with chronic budget deficits. It's been on roughly a five- to six-month budget cycle.

The Legislature passes a budget, but only by including off-the-books loans, questionable revenue estimates and accounting gimmicks. Within a few months, it falls apart and has to be reopened and "balanced" again with more of the same stuff, only to implode once again a few months later.

This year's version of the budget game differed from those of the past only in that the six-month cycle was institutionalized.

After Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed the Legislature's first budget – thereby triggering a legislative salary cutoff under a new voter-approved law – a revised and supposedly balanced alternative was enacted.

It's "supposedly" balanced because it hinges on a sudden and rather questionable assumption that the state would receive $4 billion in extra revenue.

While Brown's signature on the second budget allowed lawmakers to once again collect their paychecks, the bankers to whom the state wanted to peddle short-term "revenue anticipation notes" were skeptical. So the budget also included some spending-cut "triggers" that would be automatically pulled if the extra revenues didn't appear to be panning out, thereby making the bankers happy, or at least happy enough to buy the notes.

Three months into the 2011-12 budget, the $4 billion revenue assumption looks shaky. In fact, during the first two months, tax receipts were about $600 million short of the budget's rosy number.

The looming shortfall created semi-panic among the Legislature's Democrats during the last days of the session, and they passed a bill that would have retreated on the trigger concept. But Brown vetoed it, saying it "would have undermined investor confidence in California."

Although the official decision on triggers won't come until December, the state's bean counters expect to have a very good idea by October, after a deadline passes for delayed payment of 2010 income taxes.

Will the triggers be pulled if the money isn't there?

Probably not. They were something to satisfy lenders, not engraved into the Capitol's granite walls.

If, as now appears likely, that 2011-12 revenues do fall significantly short of assumptions, it simply will mean that Brown et al. will reopen the budget in January, thereby continuing the standard six-month cycle.

© Copyright The Sacramento Bee. All rights reserved.

Call The Bee's Dan Walters, (916) 321-1195. Back columns, www.sacbee.com/walters

• Read more articles by Dan Walters