In this scenario, state agencies — which always overstate their distress anyway — still have hundreds of millions of dollars squirreled away in revolving funds and cookie jars and maybe even a Swiss bank account or two.

So if the state can just stay afloat a few more months, the thinking goes, everything will be fine. Moby Dick will swim away, the crew will clamber back aboard and cobble the ship together, and there will be no more unpleasant talk of taxes.

At least until the next crisis.

That’s the way it usually works, especially since Oklahoma voters put in place the nearly impossible requirements for raising taxes on anything for any reason.

Many people who hang around state government, though, are worried that it won’t work this time. They are given pause by the earnestness with which Gov. Mary Fallin, who not long ago talked about eliminating the state income tax, is now imploring — to use her word — lawmakers to come up with new sources of revenue.

Through these lean years, we are told, state agencies have moved around declining resources to stay operational, robbing Peter to pay Paul, as the saying goes.

And now, the fear is, they are just about out of Peters to rob.