The state Assembly’s dominant Democrats, heaping platitude upon buzzword, declared last week that they want to spend much more money on schools, health care and other party priorities, expand Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s infrastructure program to include parks, hospitals and low-income housing and reduce the state’s chronic budget deficit.

Logic would indicate that the Democrats, in fact, are calling for substantially higher taxes of some kind to balance the budget and pay for their priorities. But try as they might, reporters who attended a Capitol news conference called by Speaker Fabian Nunez could not get him or the several dozen other Democrats to fess up to that.

They airily suggested that the time to talk about new revenues would be after there had been some sort of revelatory conversation with the California public. “What do common folks in California want?” he wondered aloud, while assuring those “common folks” that “we’re on your side.”

Nunez & Co. thus are continuing the little game they’ve played for the past couple of years — calling for more spending on almost everything, but refusing to say how it would be financed. That’s not to be confused, of course, with the little game that Republicans play — pretending that the state’s deficit-ridden finances can be straightened out and many new public works can be built without new revenues. Until recently, Schwarzenegger bought into the GOP fiction, but has implicitly given up on balancing state spending and resigned himself to more years of heavy borrowing and deficit spending.

Polls indicate that the voting public evinces little support for draconian spending cuts that would be needed to balance the budget without new taxes and that voters fully expect that, eventually, taxes will be raised.

Unfortunately, polls also indicate that voters want someone else to pay those taxes. Taxing the rich and cigarette smokers are especially popular, even though neither would come anywhere close to erasing the state’s “structural deficit” of at least $6 billion a year.

Schwarzenegger — in an indirect concession to the California Teachers Association’s victory over his “year of reform” ballot measures last year — is proposing that the schools get $1.7 billion in state aid over the legal minimum next year, but the CTA-dominated “Education Coalition” wants another $3-plus billion on top of that. Assembly Democrats generally endorse that demand.

Thus, closing the deficit, giving educators what they want and improving access to health care would add up to at least $10 billion more a year. That’s just about what the leading Democratic candidate for governor, Treasurer Phil Angelides, has been advocating, also without being very specific on how it would be financed.

What no one — not only politicians of both partisan stripes but the larger public as well — wants to acknowledge is that when it comes to state spending, there’s no free lunch. California is not the federal government, with control over the money supply and access to foreign capital to finance its deficits. Sooner or later, the state must balance its books.

If we want a balanced budget and more money for schools or health care or highways or levees, we must be willing to dig into our pockets. And if we don’t want to pay more, we should be willing to live with less. It’s really that simple.

(Walters writes for the Sacramento Bee.)