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As state leaders approach the deadline for cutting an almost unfathomable $3.5 billion from Virginia’s two-year budget, brave words and square-shouldered resolve have been replaced with frustration and recrimination.

Outgoing Gov. Tim Kaine last month vowed to make the tough decisions himself rather than risk cuts by his successor and state lawmakers. But in recent weeks he’s broadly hinted that he may propose raising revenues or rolling back tax breaks to avoid the worst of the pain.

Gov.-elect Bob McDonnell campaigned on promises to downsize government. But his surrogates wailed at the prospect that some of the nastiest chores of distributing pink slips and cutting funding for schools and mental health programs might be left for him.

Kaine releases his budget plan Friday in what promises to be a clumsy handoff from a Democratic incumbent to a Republican executive. The tension will add to the workload for legislators, who are themselves deeply divided over how to handle the latest chapter in the interminable financial crisis.

Since the current state budget was adopted two years ago, tax collections have declined by $7 billion. Partisan bickering notwithstanding, both Democrats and Republicans have struggled to make spending cuts. Half of the measures used last winter in a bipartisan agreement to balance the budget were one-time savings, including a dip into the rainy day fund, a tax amnesty, increased debt and use of federal stimulus dollars. When Kaine was forced to take new emergency budget actions in September, two-thirds of the financial strategies he employed were also temporary.

But those stopgap measures are fast disappearing from the state’s repertoire. The rainy day fund has plummeted from $1.2 billion to $575 million over two years and will likely shrink to $300 million by next summer. Stimulus dollars are drying up and will disappear in 2012.

As those options are lost, it will be more difficult to ignore the reality that the state is spending more than it collects. That is an unsustainable imbalance that will require serious and permanent corrections over the next several months.

If lawmakers opt for the lazy tactic of across-the-board cuts, they will have to carve nearly 12 percent from every agency and program. That includes car tax relief, which many Republicans insist is inviolate.

It also includes Medicaid health insurance for the indigent and nursing home residents. The program will already require a nearly $2 billion increase because of lost stimulus funds and increased demand spurred by the recession. And it includes agencies that have already borne the heaviest cuts thus far, including state parks, which lost nearly a third of their budgets.

Complicating the process is the arrival of a new governor eager to make good on at least some of his campaign promises. McDonnell maintains that new spending on economic development incentives and business tax credits will hasten Virginia’s recovery.

That’s a legitimate budget goal, but he must take care not to negate potential gains as he shifts scarce dollars from one program to another.

Cuts that lead to layoffs will create new demands on unemployment programs, food stamps and health clinics. Reductions in college budgets will force students to drop out of school because they lack adequate financial aid or because courses are canceled. Restricting access to children’s health insurance will increase demands on hospitals for charitable care.

Virginia’s leaders have too often squandered years of prosperity on costly gimmicks and fancy prisons while delaying more pressing investments in highways and academic excellence.

In lean times, those same leaders employ tactics that protract fiscal anguish and slow recovery. That destructive pattern will end only when every Democrat, Republican, delegate and senator is willing to accept a share of responsibility for the tough decisions ahead.

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