It woud be easy to simply blame our old whipping boy, Tim Eyman, for the apparent disaster looming over the King County 2009 budget, but that would be too simple and wrong.

A couple of weeks ago King County Executive Ron Sims made official what had been rumbling around county government for weeks: The new budget could be short about $148 million for the two-year 2009 - 2010 budget.

The result is crime in the streets and criminals going free or not even facing the prospect of justice.

How can this be? Surely Tim is not totally to blame, after all he is a simple guardian of the people, or so he proclaims loudly when probed.

As King County Council member Dow Constantine says in an Op-Ed on this page, it all started with Eyman's Initiative 747 that passed overwhelmingly in 2001. Its provisions, says Contantine, "limited the increase in general fund property tax collections for municipalities such as King County to 1 percent annually. The prior limit had been 6 percent, although King County's increases had been much less than that in the years preceding the initiative."

The courts found the initiative unconstitutional but members of our Washington Legislature fell all over themselves re-enacting the measure.

Constantine says the initiative did not "limit staggering increases in the price of gasoline and diesel. It did not limit the annual double-digit increases in the cost of health insurance for county employees. It merely limited the ability to pay for these things."

It should be noted here that King County Council member Larry Phillips said in a recent Op-Ed that "This never should have happened," that Sims knew of the coming budget problems, but instead of dealing with it sooner, told citizens in 2005 that era of "budget deficits was over."

So, why can't the county simply and without much ado trim a mere $148 million out of a budget totally around $5 billion?

That is always a vexing question for those citizens who are not fluent in the jargon and the rules of government budgets.

The simple reason is the county cannot cut that amount from the total $5 billion budget. Why? Well most of the budget is legally restricted in how it can be spent. The funds can only be used for what they are dedicated for and money for these items cannot be trimed or moved.

What is left over is the General Fund. That is $662 million.

That money goes mainly to finance the Sheriff's Department, the Superior Courts and the Prosecutor's office.

Sims has told the courts their budget must be slashed by $5.2 million.

The sheriff will have to cut $7.5 million which means, says Sheriff Sue Rahr. "We will have two levels of public safety," she says, perhaps even a loss of 100 deputies.

The real blow that will affect many people in our community will be the withdrawal of the prosecutor from charging people for nonvehicle thefts under $10,000. Those will be shifted to the City of Seattle.

That seems blatantly unfair to us. The mayor said the county "can't solve its budget crisis by handing its "criminal justice responsibilities to Seattle."

All of this stew is a mixture the voters of the state have brought on themselves. It was easy to vote for measures cutting taxes, but most simply did not know or did not care that the cuts would come home to roost and that actual real and important services would be cut.

We are getting what we paid for. We can easily say that Eyman, Sims or "wasteful government bureaucrats" are squandering and wasting our hard-earned dollars. But, like most responses to sharp pain, that is simply not the reality. We vote for officials, for budgets, for tax cuts.

Now we have to live with less or consider paying more. Stop pointing fingers, voters, and take your medicine.

- Jack Mayne