Recently, Gov. Pat Quinn announced a series of painful, difficult budget cuts. Ultimately, 1,938 workers will lose their jobs due to these cuts. That’s always bad news, but particularly now, when poverty is on the upswing, personal income is heading down, and total civilian employment is lower than at the trough of the recent “Great Recession.”

While it’s clear closing facilities and firing workers will be harmful on a number of levels, it’s not as if the governor has a multitude of options.  After all, he doesn’t have the unilateral power to raise revenue, nor the right to make major dollar shifts among and between budget lines appropriated by the General Assembly.  That happens to be the whole point of “line-item” budgets: curtailing the executive branch’s ability to move funding from one service area to another.

One responsibility the governor absolutely does have, however, is to implement the budget passed into law. Indeed, according to a textbook on public sector budgeting written by Irene Rubin, one of the foremost authorities on the subject, the executive branch has to accommodate “changes in the (budget) environment” by, for instance, spending less than what’s needed on a service if the line-item appropriations to support those expenditures aren’t sufficient.

According to Quinn’s office, that’s exactly what forced his hand. The governor claims FY2012 appropriations are woefully short — as in $313.5 million short — of what’s needed to maintain service levels over the full fiscal year.  Sure, one can argue that different choices for the budget ax could have been made, but at this juncture, any spending cuts implemented by state government would harm both the people relying on the cut services, as well as the fired workers who would have provided them.

Better to, I don’t know, actually solve the problem. The good news is there are a couple of easy, short-term solutions available that obviate the need to make the governor’s proposed cuts. The first is so facile it should be a no-brainer.

Back when the FY2012 budget passed, it was based on a revenue estimate of $33.17 billion. As it turns out, actual revenue for FY2012 will be more like $33.9 billion, according to the nonpartisan Commission on Government Forecasting and Accountability. That means Illinois will have some $700 million more this year than what was estimated when the budget was made. If the General Assembly simply passes a resolution adjusting its revenue projection to reflect reality (there’s a concept) and then appropriates $313.5 million of this “new revenue” to the applicable budget lines — voila, no closures, no fired workers, more vulnerable populations served. All this by fixing what amounts to an accounting error.

The second simple solution is one I’ve mentioned before: decoupling from the recently enacted federal “bonus depreciation” rules. The new depreciation rules allow businesses to depreciate the full value of certain assets immediately in one year, rather than over time. That’s a problem for Illinois because the state piggybacks much of its corporate income tax rules on those existing at the federal level. So, unless Illinois decouples from this federal decision to allow businesses to fast forward tax breaks, the state loses $600 million in corporate tax revenue it otherwise would’ve collected in FY2012.

Long term, decision makers still have to fix the structural fiscal flaws that are the primary cause of the state’s ongoing deficit problems by modernizing tax policy both to comport with the new, service-based economy and make the system fairer to middle-income, low-income and poor families.

Ralph Martire is executive director of the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability.