AUSTIN — OK, team, we're just past half-time in the 75th session of the Texas Legislature, and it seems like a good point to review the basics. Because 1) this is a very basic session indeed and 2) the usual number of letters to the editor by assorted lunkheads indicate that many of us of have forgotten the basics.

Basically, government is about only two things: 1) where the money comes from and 2) how the money is spent. In other words, taxing and spending, which are known in government circles as finance and appropriations. By keeping our eyes fixed on these two fundamental elements, we pretty much fulfill our responsibilities as citizens or — as we might say in this era of corporate domination — as members of the board of directors of the enterprise.

The lunkheads have been writing in to accuse assorted members of the Lege of wanting to raise our taxes. Wrong. All politicians hate raising taxes. The reason they loathe, despise and abhor raising taxes is because every time they do, some lunkhead leaps up at the next election and shouts, "This guy raised our taxes, so everybody should vote against him!" The Lege is in fact trying to cut property taxes, but taxes are not the only side of the equation.

On the spending side, your state government has four basic areas of responsibility. You have 1) your roads, 2) your schools, 3) your prisons and 4) what former Gov. Allan Shivers always called your "eleemosynary institutions." That means hospitals for the mentally ill, homes for the mentally retarded, schools for the blind and deaf, and so forth. With apologies to the environmentalists, to those trying to run our state parks and to many others, everything else that the state government does is pretty much fluff — at least in terms of the amount of money we spend on it.

(True, the feds have just dumped the entire responsibility for the welfare program back onto the states, but since no one has any idea how that will work out, let's skip it for now.)

We are a big state, and we have a lot of people. "Big state and lotta people" equals "takes a lot of money to run it." Sorry, we're not New Hampshire.

In order to figure out where we go from here, it is first necessary to figure out where we are now, and that involves a short history lesson. On the tax side, we have an extremely regressive tax structure. What that means is "unfair," and if there's one thing that people hate more than taxes, it's unfair taxes.

On the spending side, the only thing Texas has ever done well is roads. We are the King of Cadillac Highways. We are Mississippi with good roads.

We have done everything else so badly that in recent years, all three of our other major functions of state government have come under court order, either from our own Texas judicial system or from the feds. Looking on the bright side, at least the courts have forced us to do what we should have been doing all along. But on the downside, being under court order violates a First Principle of sensible government — to wit, always retain as much flexibility as possible on both the taxing and the spending sides.

Of course, we could have done it differently. The state was sitting on an immense sea of oil, and had we taxed it at a realistic severance rate, we could now have the finest system of education in the world, but there's no use crying over spilt, etc. Back in the '50s and the '60s, Big Oil pretty much owned the Texas Legislature; there it is, nothing to be done about it.

We have also made some criminally stupid mistakes limiting our flexibility in both taxing and spending, which is why the Lege is now stuck even in trying to cut taxes. For instance, three-fourths out of every penny we pay in gasoline taxes has to go to highways, and the other one-fourth goes to education, which is one reason we have great roads and sorry schools.

Our state budget is lousy with "dedicated funds," meaning that this tax must go for that purpose and that tax must go for this purpose, until the upshot is there's practically no room to maneuver, no flexibility in the system to address changing times and changing needs. The Lege has been moving on "un-dedication" in recent years (the Screwworm Eradication Fund is no more), but many specialty funds live on.

Likewise on the taxing side, where we have tied our own hands repeatedly. Easy winner in the contest for Dumbest Thing That Bob Bullock Ever Did (and our lieutenant guv has done some monumentally dumb things in his life, as he is the first to admit, but they don't usually involve government) was to propose and pass a state constitutional amendment in 1993 saying that the voters have to approve a state income tax before one can be imposed — and that if they do, at least two-thirds of it must go to local school property tax relief and the rest must go to public and higher education.

That may sound good to you. But if (as seems quite possible) we face a horrible water crisis in the near future or some unforeseeable health emergency hits the state, there we'll be, stuck with no way to raise money to resolve it.

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Molly Ivins is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.