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EDITORIAL: Smoke and taxes  

Once again, the state's bad budgeting practices come home to roost. But don't blame just a Legislature and governor who play fast and loose with numbers. Blame a budget process that lets them.

Two courts last week blocked, for now, the state's plan to collect taxes on cigarettes sold on Indian reservations to non-Indians. The issue will now wend through the courts; for how long is anyone's guess. . . .

But putting the money in the budget when it was obvious the collections would be delayed was irresponsible. You'd think the state would have learned its lesson in 2008, when Gov. Eliot Spitzer included $200 million in his budget for taxes that were never collected.

This kind of fictional budgeting underscores the need for a better budget process, one with a mechanism -- perhaps, as some have suggested, certification of the validity of the numbers by the state comptroller or an independent budget office. We're all for creativity in approaching the state's problems, but balanced budgets should not be an exercise in creative writing.

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