One of the things most maddening about our tribal politics these days is the hypocrisy and fluidity of partisan politicians’ ability to value money. Nationally, the best example is the national debt, where to Democrats, $5 trillion added under President Bush was “unpatriotic,” but $10 trillion added under President Obama was clever economic pump priming. To Republicans, $10 trillion was proof of a desire to destroy America from within, but now “deficits don’t matter.” (Sigh.)

It’s almost as if none of these people should be taken seriously.

Here on the state level, we are desperately lucky that our budget must legally be balanced, which limits the ability to promise the moon in exchange for votes, put those promises on the credit card and let future generations worry about paying for it all. But “limiting” is not the same thing as “eliminating,” as several education-related bills have shown us this week.

Gov. Steve Sisolak campaigned on a promise to give teachers state-wide a 3 percent raise each year and an additional 2 percent roll-up bump in pay. The problem is that most of that money doesn’t actually exist—it would cost the Clark County School District $100 million, $45 million of which it doesn’t have. The reaction by legislative Democrats can be summed up as “Meh – what’s another $100 million state-wide? We’ll dig it up somewhere. If not, it’s easy enough to raise taxes again!”

I, like most people, would love to see public school teachers get paid more. You get more of what you value, after all, and if we want smart young professionals to consider teaching as a career option, competitive pay matters. But there are always limits on what any employee, public or private sector, can earn, because the resources of the employer are always limited, too.

One of the mechanisms we have in our education system to help find that balance is the collective bargaining between teacher’s unions and local governments. In theory, this should always result in teacher pay set as high as realistically possible while still respecting the limits of the public coffers. In reality, though, it’s clear that unions aren’t doing much for their teachers, which is why morale among teachers in our two largest school districts is so embarrassingly dismal and why Sisolak felt the need to promise the pay raise in the first place.

Why Sisolak and a handful of government employees want to repeat that same failure on a statewide basis by expanding public employee collective bargaining is beyond me, but there it is. And I suppose the hundreds of millions of additional dollars this will cost taxpayers will be found in some couch cushions.

Other education funding issues, though — even when they are far smaller slices of the budget pie — are getting some serious scrutiny. Take the relatively paltry $20 million requested to extend the Opportunity Scholarship program, without which hundreds of children will be forced back into already overcrowded traditional public elementary schools. $20 million, to put it in perspective, would build about 3/5ths of one Washoe County elementary school that would house about the same number of kids benefiting from the scholarships, and that’s before you factor in teacher salaries. And yet, somehow this much better return on investment, one that Democratic-politician-funding teacher unions coincidentally can’t take credit for, is “unsustainable.”

Likewise, those same politicians want to cut off funding for new charter schools completely, all in the name of “quality control.” If this same logic applied to traditional public schools… Well, it’s almost as if there’s some ulterior motive there.

And then there are the strange proposals to limit the income of municipalities being hit in the form of millions of dollars in unfunded mandates, like AB411, which would make traffic tickets civil infractions. In criminal cases, you have the right to force the government to prove the case against you beyond a reasonable doubt, and to confront the witnesses against you. This bill makes it easier for the government to take money away from you by lowering the burden of proof and allowing police “testimony” by written statement. But then it also takes away any real ability to collect outstanding fines people often don’t pay, which means that the innocent are likely to suffer while the guilty can avoid paying for their infractions. And that means that programs like local misdemeanor drug courts (which are life-saving for drug-addicted offenders) must find other funding or disappear altogether. You can take away arrest warrants or jail time for traffic infractions (and we should) without watering down long-established due process protections for those accused of wrongdoing.

The pattern that has emerged in this session is one in which partisan wish lists trump attention to detail, common sense or a big picture perspective — all of which would allow lawmakers to see how their various proposals would affect overall budget formation and also enable policy prioritization. Politicians can always be trusted to be inconsistent and hypocritical in any legislative year, but when a single party is in control and lacks a sufficiently powerful opposition to help them with their careless impulses, the problem is especially acute.

At the federal level, where budgets are functionally unlimited, individual politicians are so rarely held accountable for the outcomes of their votes that partisan carelessness is sort of the coin of the realm. But on the state level, where budgets have to be balanced and the negative impacts of poorly planned and sloppily written laws are real and immediate, our legislators cannot afford to continue acting this way.

Orrin Johnson has been writing and commenting on Nevada and national politics since 2007. He started with an independent blog, First Principles, and was a regular columnist for the Reno Gazette-Journal from 2015-2016. By day, he is a criminal defense attorney in Reno. Follow him on Twitter @orrinjohnson, or contact him at [email protected]