Q: What's the worst way to start a crash diet?

A: Run out of food.

At his end-of-the-year press conference today, Governor Corzine gave a pessimistic view of the next year in New Jersey and committed to cutting spending. This is gonna hurt. We've been gluttons for too long, and as we tighten our belts we will be in more pain because of it.

(Fortunately, for most of us, this is just a metaphor; that said, please remember the "We Can't Let This Bank Fail" food drive.)

It's a shame that it will hurt this much. Some of this was avoidable, even with the financial sector's plummeting fortunes.

Think about one aspect of the pain: cutting the government's budget will mean lost public-sector jobs. Transitioning from a government job to a private-sector job is hard -- and it's made even harder when private-sector unemployment is high. People with "safe" government jobs will feel more pain than if we had reduced our budget earlier, increased private employment in the state, and thereby encouraged them to get private-sector jobs.

Don't get me wrong: a bad economy always hurts. But this one will hurt more because of our dependence on the Nanny State.

And we will only be making this particular dependency (government jobs) worse if we pretend that feeding the government is an economic stimulus. Go to war with Connecticut? Maybe that would stimulate the economy. Pour more money into government contracts for road building? Not so much.

I don't only blame Governor Corzine. As WBGO reports, "His most recent plan to delay pension payments floundered in the Senate." But I do worry about him; he needs to follow through on this promise:

Let’s actually get in front of the curve as opposed to staying with it and waiting for some other shoe to fall, to drop, to get to a conclusion. I feel very strongly about that. It’s not exactly a love fest with regard to those issues.

We should have done that already. We shouldn't have a 33-plus-billion-dollar budget. Yes, we should have encouraged municipalities to merge or share services -- something I heard Corzine claim on WBGO this morning, but that isn't included in their write-up -- but we also should have made them less dependent on the state in the first place.

Governor Corzine, State Assemblymen, State Senators, now is the time. Yes, this is going to hurt, but the time will not come again in which people are this willing to regain control on spending. Tightening the belt will hurt, yes, but you have to do that anyway. Ratchet it tighter than you feel comfortable with, because normally the ratchet works only one way, and you can't tighten it at all. Get ahead of the curve.

Don't play games: don't claim that you've made deep cuts when you're only going back to 2006 funding levels, don't claim that you're only borrowing for "required expenditures" when every penny borrowed or spent represents a choice to go further into debt, don't posture as a deficit hawk while promising bailouts and stimulus packages for big government projects.

Do your job: get the state's finances in order.

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