California's government is running out of cash, slicing services to the poor and the sick, laying off workers and cutting the pay of those who remain. But the Democrats who run the Legislature think this is the perfect time to obligate the taxpayers to a multibillion-dollar commitment to increase education spending.

If that idea sounds familiar, it is. The plan was first presented as Proposition 1B, part of the May 19 special election package that voters overwhelmingly rejected. It was put in that package in part to win the support of the California Teachers Association, which spent more than $7 million in a failed attempt to persuade the voters to pass it.

Despite that result, the Democrats intend to include a nearly identical plan in the budget they say they will present on the floors of the Assembly and Senate this week. Republican lawmakers and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger should insist that it be deleted.

What the state desperately needs now and will need in the next few years is flexibility. With fewer tax dollars coming into the treasury, lawmakers ought to have the ability to prioritize each year's spending according to the state's needs and the money that's available. If that analysis yields an increase for the schools, so be it. But if a greater need arises elsewhere, legislators should be able to address it.

Instead, this plan would tie the Legislature's hands and commit the state to at least $9.3 billion in new education spending over the next decade.

Democratic leaders and the teachers unions say the money will be owed to the schools because they are getting less than they expected to receive this year and next. Without the plan they are proposing, the Democrats warn, the state might be obligated to pay even more to the schools, even sooner.

But Schwarzenegger and his staff believe the state can keep education spending to the minimum allowed in the constitution without having to increase it later to compensate for the shortfall. The teachers association has threatened to sue the state if Schwarzenegger's interpretation is adopted.

The dispute demonstrates once again the folly of ballot-box budgeting, through which narrow interest groups appeal to the voters for favored status in the state's spending plan. Proposition 98, passed by voters in 1988, is a hopelessly complicated formula that has not helped the schools as much as its authors intended but still makes life more difficult than it needs to be for legislators already struggling to balance the budget.

We have been and continue to be strong supporters of the public schools, and we think they deserve a fair shake in the budget. But this year, with billions of new dollars coming their way from the federal stimulus package, the schools will have to get by with less from the state. That's exactly the kind of real-time judgment call that legislators and the governor should have the power to make.

Next year, or the year after, the situation might be different, and the needs of the schools might rise above other programs. But nobody knows what the economy will be like in two years or how much tax revenue the state will take in. To commit billions of dollars to one program regardless of the condition of the state's finances is the same kind of irresponsible budgeting that got the state into this mess in the first place.