By John Brummett

It was fun, but I did not quite convert myself.

Roby Brock, publisher of Talk Business Quarterly magazine, had an idea for his next issue, due out in early November.

Since the Republicans must run somebody against Gov. Mike Beebe next year and nab at least 3 percent of the vote or lose automatic access to the ballot, Brock wondered if I would pretend to be an ambitious young conservative willing to make the kamikaze race for the experience and exposure. And then he wanted me to concoct a message for such a campaign.

Look for the magazine in a week or two, and, when the time is appropriate, I’ll publish this play-like-a-Republican exercise on our Web site at arkansasnews.com.

But I will go ahead and tell you this much: The message is fiscal and economic conservatism. It is that the time has come to stop the steady growth by inertia of state government spending. It is that the time has come to stop taking more taxes than our neighboring states.

I don’t buy it, except in a limited way. State government’s main job in general revenue (highways being “special revenue”) is to educate, medicate and incarcerate, as they say at the Governors’ Association meetings. The costs of schooling, health care and imprisonment in a poor state don’t seem to be going down.

But I like the debate. It’s real; it’s relevant; it’s substantive; it’s not yelled or nonsensical or emotional or contrived or expressed by name-calling. It’s not about social or cultural or religious divides.

So with that recently in mind, I was most interested in state government’s fiscal news Tuesday.

Owing to the recession’s drain on state government’s tax receipts, Beebe, as required by law, has reduced the authorized spending level by $100 million — this from a $4.5 billion general revenue budget.

And the upshot seemed to be that this wasn’t going to be much felt — this vanishing hundred million dollars.

The public schools have fund balances they carried over from last year because you paid more in taxes than the schools could get spent before the year was out. So they can replenish themselves. Actually, they can make up the shortfall from fund balances and still have $13 million extra.

Colleges and universities can hit tuition, with help from the new lottery, and, as Lu Hardin showed at the University of Central Arkansas, there are myriad ways to gin up on-campus money from hostage students.

The bookstore, the cafeteria, activity fees — why, it’s a license to steal out there in higher academia. Then you can sell bonds based on the income and put a fancy scoreboard on your football field.

The vast Department of Human Services — that’s all the welfare agencies — says it can absorb its $21 million reduction by cutting down travel and not filling all positions. That’s largely because the federal stimulus package threw all manner of millions at Medicaid.

Beyond that, the agency has its own rare budget authority under the law to move its money around among line items. In other words, the agency now can divert money it previously was misspending or overspending.

It appeared there were only two areas of real potential pain, both having to do with catching bad guys and putting them in jail.

The prisons may not be able to hire staff for a new facility and officials are worrying about how to pay the contract for inmate medical services.

The State Police might not get to open a second trooper school to get more officers on the street quicker.

But if those needs get severe, somebody could always find $4 million or $5 million in a $4.4 billion budget, maybe under the sofa cushions in some state agency. I know of $13 million over at the state Education Department.

Richard Weiss, veteran and amiable director of the state Department of Finance and Administration, said that one factor softening this blow was that state government agencies tend to be run by experienced people who know how to stretch a dollar.

But only when they have to, my economically conservative alter ego might argue.

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John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699.