I'm going to tell you right up front that this is a column about the state budget and involves a little math.

Wait! Don't move on to the next story. I know this can get a bit tedious. But the math is easy, and the story itself tells us a lot about how this state is being governed.

I decided to write about this when Governor Pat Quinn appeared on public television's Chicago Tonight show last week and was grilled hard by hosts Phil Ponce and Carol Marin.

The governor did his best to deflect some tough questions about his budget and other topics. (Many of the questions seemed to come right from one of my previous columns, by the way.)

One thing the interviewers returned to again and again was how Quinn's proposed budget cuts over a billion dollars from education spending. The governor wants to stop those cuts with a one-percentage-point income-tax surcharge. Quinn has warned that without a tax hike, the schools will suffer. Thousands of teacher layoffs will result. Kids will be put into ever-more-crowded classrooms.

Like all of the budgets proposed by governors in the past few years, Pat Quinn's spending outline last week was an almost complete fantasy. It has pretty much zero chance of surviving intact and will have to be tossed out and substantially reworked before the session ends.

Unless the school interests can pull off a legislative miracle during an anti-incumbent election year, Quinn's proposed one-percentage-point tax increase to prevent $1.3 billion in school-funding cuts and pay another $1.5 billion in overdue bills to schools and universities is deader than a rock on a stump. House Speaker Michael Madigan made that pretty darned clear right after the speech.

The Statehouse is buzzing yet again with talk of a new gaming expansion plan. This time, the players say, they have their acts together. Really.

I'm always pretty skeptical of these big legislative pushes. Expanding gaming is one of the most difficult things to do. A big reason is that there's so much money involved with gaming that people get too greedy. Eventually, the bill suffocates under its own weight. Too many goodies are added to the Christmas tree.

The only time this ever works is when all the legislative leaders and the governor are pulling together. That's how gaming was expanded under Governor George Ryan and that's how video poker was legalized last year under Governor Pat Quinn. Everybody at the top, Democrat and Republican, worked together to get it done.

Since my 2008 campaign for the presidency I have often been asked, "How would a constitutionalist president go about dismantling the welfare-warfare state and restoring a constitutional republic?" This is a very important question, because without a clear road map and set of priorities, such a president runs the risk of having his pro-freedom agenda stymied by the various vested interests that benefit from big government.