North Carolina finally has a budget, over a month past due and with government agencies and their thousands of employees in limbo.

And, in true political fashion, that has little to do with guts and far more to do with fear of voter retribution, the state’s lawmakers have eked out a financial plan that cuts education funding by $225 million but leaves what will be cut up to local school officials

Before our senators and representatives pat themselves on the back and try to convince voters that leaving the cutting to local school systems was a brilliant, compassionate way to deliver a financial blow, one should examine what it really means.

The budget stops short of cutting teachers, raises class sizes in kindergarten through third grade and hands the major decisions on where to lower the ax in grades 4-12 to someone other than the General Assembly.

This from the group which generally loves to tell agency heads where to spend their money in good times. Not so much in tough economic times, though.

In a nutshell, what lawmakers have done is toss the responsibility — and thus the eventual criticism — down to local government, freeing themselves of the retribution from a large voting bloc — educators.

Simply put, when schools don’t have enough textbooks or when teachers or other educational staff are handed a pink slip, senators and representatives can say they had nothing to do with it — it was a local decision.

What a stand-up bunch of folks it takes to pass the buck when, in fact, the buck should have stopped in Raleigh.

Granted legislators will take a lot of heat with decisions they had to make to hammer out a $19 billion budget, tops among them increased taxes and large service cuts, but that doesn’t mean they should have tossed educational leaders to the curb to fend for themselves.

Yet, in our estimation, that’s exactly what they did when they handed down millions in cuts with no direction and no responsibility for what will come next.

Under normal circumstances, and with normal budgeting, we’d say that local educators are better able to define areas where they can afford cuts than those in Raleigh.

But in extremely difficult times, with historic cuts being made and on-again off-again decisions regarding educational cuts, it seems that lawmakers took the easiest road and left the difficult decisions to those on the local level.

One would think in hard times we’d stand together, finding solutions that might hurt but could be lived with. Instead those with the power to initiate that togetherness have opted to toss out the crumbs and let others decide how they’ll be divvied up.