Do you know where your taxes are?

KENNETT, Mo. -- In this day of a faltering national economy, declining manpower needs and slumping business profits contending with increasing inflationary factors, Missourians have grown increasingly nervous as they opened their morning newspaper or caught the radio's brief message of budgetary woes in Jefferson City.

Each day seems to bring new cries of alarm over the inadequacy of state revenue to match state expectations in amidst a field of hundreds of Missouri programs.

As they keep looking for that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, taxpayers are disappointed when they encounter only the reasons cited by state officials for this or that cutback in program objectives, that cancellation of projects only just recently deemed essential to our collective well-being or the promise to restore reductions from other sources that, on the surface, appear equally deserving.

This is the worst of times at the moment we were expecting progress, when our public schools would be engaged in curricula programs that were promised last year or the last decade, when programs to restore the health of physically and mentally challenged citizens would be fully operational, when our aging highways would have been replaced by gleaming new superhighways that adequately managed our ever-growing motorized population, when underfunded programs would have been given adequate resources to meet their first-cost estimates and goals.

Alas, no such luck. Although overly optimistic program results are as much a part of public service as the expected political arguments over their actual need and their financial integrity, our state has in recent months met the prospect of a cloudy future, influenced by many of the conditions noted earlier, and our "recovery," if indeed it can even be called that, has been slow in coming, even on some days seeming further distant than before.

When Gov. Bob Holden unveiled his long-awaited plan for spending in the fiscal year that will not begin until July 1, he was anything but optimistic about the future funding of several programs that have become more or less permanent fixtures in the state's workload of education, economic development and health care, proposing even less than has been set aside for programs for the remainder of the current fiscal year 2003 budget. This backtracking was essential, the governor explained, because of numerous economic factors beyond even the influence of Jefferson City, marking it as the first declining budget in more than a decade, when circumstances somewhat resembling those currently were at full play.

During the end of the second term of Gov. John Ashcroft, this writer took part in the closing of too many mental hospital wards, creating images that still remain seared in the mind even to this moment. Being spared from this latest tragedy does little to mitigate the horror of seeing parents and grandparents accompany their children from hospital wards around the state. It was not Missouri's best moment.

What is clearly called for in Missouri, as well as in other states, is a budget that can be crafted in the spring for the contingencies of future months and years, and fortunately for us, there is a name for such a process. It's called performance-based budgeting, a process which can determine the efficacy of state programs and their funding patterns. It's not exactly a new idea, although it has been avoided by most political entities for a number of reasons, not the least because it holds public officials accountable for the complete funding of existing programs. It is a doubly important process because it keeps officials from overbudgeting, relying on a hoped-for change of circumstances that will somehow relieve politicians of embarrassing and counterproductive budgetary allocations.

One suspects performance-based budgeting may have been less-than-enthusiastically adopted by political figures because it requires constant attention from the only group held responsible: namely, the budgetary officials of both the executive and legislative branches of government. Under the present system, executive and legislative groups involved in the budgetary process are only required to divide the projected revenue with the expected expenditures.

There is no requirement that the allocated revenue actually exists in the hands of the approvers, making the only duty of those responsible the less-than-secure assurance that sufficient revenue was expected and that the estimated program costs were reasonable under circumstances that are no longer germane. Dialogue under this system is simple: "This amount of revenue should finance what we expect will happen to this program months from now." While the dialogue for approving the requested spending is: "We think these estimates are correct, but we have no way of knowing at this part of the process." Just how iffy can spending public money be?

The saving grace of performance-based budgeting is that it permits constant supervision of previously approved spending and is accomplished in sufficient time to avoid the last-minute deficits so often occurring in blind-faith projections by officials who are relieved of any responsibility for the over-spending.

Those engaged in the political process find themselves doubly blessed by the omission of accountability for the successful funding of new and or expanded public programs, since few if any among this group has ever been voted out of office due to lagging economies and lowered revenue. It only makes sense to require the same degree of responsibility for success from those who allocate the revenue as those who must bear the cost of suffering their reduction or elimination.

The crying of distressed children must not become a permanent fixture of public programs in Missouri.

Jack Stapleton is the editor of Missouri News & Editorial Service.