While the North Carolina General Assembly is not scheduled to convene for another several months, and won’t face constructing a new two-year budget until January 2011, it is time for state legislators to begin thinking about how they will tackle that task.

Last year the state faced one of worst budget shortfalls in history as legislators and the governor hammered out the current spending bill while dealing with projections that revenue could fall $3 billion short of needs. Some of that was political smoke and mirrors to justify additional taxes and fees, but a good portion of that deficit was real. North Carolina’s practice of irresponsible spending today while putting off eventually paying the bill had started coming home to roost.

We say started, because it could grow worse.

Look around the nation at how bad state budgets have become. In California, a state that was reduced in 2009 to handing out IOUs that weren’t worth as much as the paper they were printed on to people owed state money, lawmakers might be facing a nearly insurmountable $21 billion shortfall this year.

In Arizona, the government is looking to actually sell the state capitol building then leasing the structure as a way to produce a one-time (and short-sighted) cash infusion to balance its budget.

State economics might not yet be that desperate in North Carolina, but the General Assembly and the governor’s office has in recent years followed the same trend these states have tread. Out-of-control spending when times are good and tax revenues are flowing in, followed by the inability to curb spending when those tax revenues slow during times of recession.

In North Carolina, as with those other fiscally irresponsible states, elected leaders have even robbed money from enterprise or set-aside funds, such as the highway maintenance and construction fund and the lottery’s school capital improvement funds, for a short-term general fund balance.

It is time North Carolina lawmakers stopped following the practices of these nearly bankrupt states and show some fiscal leadership.

To do so we call upon those in Raleigh to reconsider a proposal by District 90 Rep. Sarah Stevens. Last year she suggested the state scrap the old method of budgeting. That old method essentially consists of taking the existing budget and hammering at it, taking out a million dollars here, adding $2 million dollars there, until some sort of spending bill emerges.

Instead, Stevens said the General Assembly should start at zero, as if there is no existing budget, taking the existing revenue expected to come into state coffers, then build a spending plan from the ground up, one that conforms with that revenue without need of piling new taxes and fees on state residents and businesses.

Such a task might be daunting, and could prove unpopular in some quarters when non-essential pork barrel spending is eliminated, but those elected to office are done so to exhibit leadership and take on the tough work.

State officials have all of this year and the 2011 sessions to work on such a plan. Now is the time to get started.