Here’s something that’s often forgotten about in all this talk about the budget disaster in Kansas

Just before New Year’s Day, Kansas did the classic late-Friday news dump on Wednesday, when it announced that the state took in $15 million less than expected in tax revenue for December.

This isn’t surprising news, and probably won’t be for some time. At this point, it would only be remarkable if Kansas actually matched its revenue forecasts.

Kansas has a melange of budget problems, many of them deeper than the month-by-month revenue-projection strikeouts.

One is the possibility that Kansas may have to find up to $500 million to fund K-12 education after a panel of judges decided this week that the state isn’t meeting the constitutional threshold of adequate school funding.

Another is the fact that Kansas job and business growth is so slow that it’s not coming close to offsetting the revenue losses that are a direct result of Gov. Sam Brownback’s tax policies.

Estimates show that the state has to make up roughly $279 million this year and perhaps $650 million next year just to balance the state’s checkbook (figures that don’t include the possibility of increased school finance).

But remember, those cuts are what it will take just so that the income and expenses match evenly to leave $0.00 in the Kansas checking account at the end of the year.

That doesn’t cut it in the eyes of anyone who responsibly runs government (or a business or a household). Emergencies and unforeseen expenses happen all the time in state government, like major weather events or economic downturns.

One of the big reasons that the credit rating agencies cut Kansas’ bond rating in 2014 was because the budget policies didn’t leave enough money sitting untouched at the end of the year to account for the unpredictable costs in running a government. 

Smart policymakers always carve out what’s often called a rainy-day fund for government budgets. Around 8 percent of the general fund is sometimes seen as a minimally prudent stash of emergency cash. In Kansas, the general fund is about $6 billion, so leaving $480 million in that rainy-day fund would be smart. Even half of that would make some sense. It will also be very difficult to accomplish, given the state’s new flipping-over-the-couch-cushions method of budgeting.

John Vratil, former Kansas senator from Leawood, used to espouse the wisdom of maintaining an adequate rainy-day fund not that long ago. Vratil, local voters will remember, was a statesman seen by Brownback’s political musclemen as being too moderate, and he decided to leave Topeka when it became clear that he was being targeted by more conservative elements of the state’s Republican party.