The budget Gov. Jeb Bush's unveiled this week is inadequate in nearly every way, offering little help to schools, state workers and health and social programs.

Since taking office, Governor Bush and Lt. Governor Brogan have consistently proven that education is the top priority of their administration. . . .

That's the first line of the summary Gov. Jeb Bush issued along with his budget this week; it maintains the same boastful tone throughout. The preparation and printing should have been charged not to the taxpayers but to his campaign account. To be sure, he's not the first governor to lard a budget with political propaganda. But as Florida is still severely straitened by the recession and the impact of Sept. 11, this was no time for it.

The truth is that the budget is inadequate in nearly every way. It will not lift the schools one centimeter out of the financial mediocrity that alarms even the conservative business community. It will repair too little of the damage to health and juvenile crime-prevention programs that was done at the Legislature's special session on the deficit. As the governor conceded to a conference of newspaper editors, it is at best a "continuation budget."

Among the things continued, regrettably, are his irrational exuberance for even more tax cuts and for casting out even more state workers, 3,000 this time, into the brave new world of "outsourcing," a world without pension benefits, health insurance or employment rights. For the state workers lucky enough to keep their jobs, there will be no raises, only the opportunity to compete for discretionary bonuses. Even as some public schools face hiring freezes and a summer with all their kids on the streets, Bush proposes to continue the $50-million tax credit boondoggle for corporations that subsidize private school tuition. Chalk off $32-million more to another tax-free shopping holiday; if the schools had that money, might fewer teachers have to purchase their own supplies or beg them from parents?

On close inspection, the $726-million increase in the basic public school financing formula that he touted last week turns out to be sourced primarily by $440-million from growth in the local property tax base and another diversion, $225-million this time, from pension surpluses. (Yes, that's the same pension fund that just lost $306-million down the Enron drain. Shouldn't Florida be putting up a firewall instead?)

One of the most interesting items in the budget is a $400-million fund for unspecified purposes. As the governor conceded, that could include projects important to legislators -- i.e., turkeys. Or it could be used to supplement school or health programs that legislators find inadequate. In other words, it's a $400-million pile of bargaining chips. That may be shrewd politics, but it is not leadership.

Another is his treatment of $150-million in revenue that Florida will lose because Congress curtailed the estate tax credit. The budget describes this as a "savings to Florida taxpayers." According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington, all of that sum is a loss to the state, but little of it is savings for Florida taxpayers. The federal government will get most of that money instead.

A particularly cruel result of the special session last month terminates the "medically needy" program for people with extraordinary medical bills who earn too much for Medicaid, on June 30. Bush's budget would restore it for one more year, but with the requirement that beneficiaries first spend heavily (at the rate of $156-million a year) from their own pockets. One analyst said it essentially would require clients to spend down to the Medicaid income ceiling without regard for how they would pay their mortgages or rent. Put another way, a family with $2,000 a month income would have to spend two-thirds of their income on medical bills before the state would help them, and then it would require another 5 percent of their income as a copayment. Of the program to provide dental, vision and hearing services to adult Medicaid clients, only emergency dental services would remain.

The question this budget squarely presents is whether the people of Florida are as cheap and flint-hearted as the governor assumes them to be. If there is any worse thing than raising taxes during a recession, it is to enact a budget like this. What the budget demonstrates, above all, is the one point Bush won't admit: that Florida's revenue base is inadequate and must be overhauled, as the lonely voice of Senate President John McKay has been saying. In the near term, surely there are taxes the Legislature could levy, or exemptions it could repeal. The $2-million annual giveaway to the Professional Golf Hall of Fame might be one place to start.

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