Remember the night before a big test in that impossible class? You pretty much have to ace it because you’ve scuffled the entire semester. So you’ve got a pot of coffee there, the book’s open and you’re ready for the all-nighter, but every time you try to read the text book you start nodding off because, well, you just don’t understand the material.

Yeah, that pretty much sums up Sacramento tonight as lawmakers work to pass a budget.

Or how about this analogy?

Some smug jerk in a sports car cut you off in traffic so you raced to catch up. You’ll show him! So you catch up to him at the light, you’re revving the engine and the light turns green. You floor it! You’re neck-and-neck but then you see a cop with the radar gun on one side of the road and a young mom pushing a stroller across the street directly ahead. Do you try to slow down to avoid the ticket or, worse, the manslaughter charge? Or audaciously swerve out of the way at such a high rate of speed the cop might figure it’s too dangerous to catch you?

The more cynical among us might choose the second scenario as more analogous to the nonsensical game of chicken going on as Democrats and Republicans tussle over the budget.

I asked our local lawmakers today what’s going on and I get the common refrain: I don’t know.

That’s a relief. For a second there I thought I was due for a heart-stopping surprise. So I’ve got that going for me … which is nice.

“We’re hoping for a compromise. Today is a drop-dead deadline so it’s really crazy today,” Assemblyman Van Tran said. “We have to do something or we may lose the opportunity” for long-term budget reform.

I checked in with state Sen. Tom Harman later and the news was still pretty much the same.

“It’s so fluid up here. I just can’t give you a report,” Harman said just after 7 p.m. “The senate was just called back into session in 45 minutes and we’ll see what happens. We just don’t know… We think the Republicans are going to come out getting quite a bit of the things in the deal that we wanted, but I just left a leadership meeting 25 minutes ago and we just don’t know.”

Harman wants to slash $24 billion out of the budget to balance it now and no “partial fixes” to buy time so lawmakers can keep chipping away.

One of those “partial fixes” involved reducing education funding to the statutorily required level. That could save the state $3 billion to $4 billion and give negotiators more time, but if lawmakers don’t act by midnight tonight the deal will expire and education funding will jump accordingly, putting California into an even deeper hole, Assemblyman Chuck DeVore said.They can’t go back and reduce it retroactively. That was overwhelmingly approved on a bipartisan basis in the Assembly, but Republican senators decided to hold it up, hoping to yield deeper concessions.

“It’s a game of Capitol chicken. Who will blink first?” DeVore said. “But the longer you wait the more profoundly out of balance the budget becomes.”

If the Senate passes the education cuts and the governor signs the bill the IOUs wouldn’t have to go out until the middle of August instead of Thursday, DeVore said. “Otherwise, we’re going to run out of cash within a couple of weeks.”

The stalling tactic sent Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger over to the Democrats for more negotiating. Before that, he was scolding the Democrats, vowing to veto their budget solutions, which involve higher taxes like $1.50 more for a pack of cigarettes, a new 9.9% extraction tax on oil companies and adding $15 to the fee to renew your vehicle license.

“We want reforms and we want cuts, and what’s happening is we’re not getting reforms, just cuts and fee increases,” DeVore said. “If you don’t do the reforms we’ll run government as inefficiently as possible with less money pumped into it in an inefficient way.”

One of DeVore’s main budget solutions involves cracking down on welfare fraud.

The reality is the state has been spending money it doesn’t have for years. It’s referendum politics gone wild. As I’ve said before, voters approved all sorts of goodies the state can’t afford, and because of Proposition 13, the cap on property taxes, it’s impossible to generate more revenue unless people are spending more on retail. Since the state, like the rest of the country, is economically stagnant because of 11.5% unemployment and the difficulty in getting loans there’s no way California can find a quick fix to its problems without slashing spending.

One thing I’m sure of: Expect a lot less in government services over time. That’s all any of us can count on.

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