That's it? That's the plan? To balance the state budget on the backs of 5-year-olds? The Republican caucus deserves credit for at last providing specific cost-cutting ideas, although it waited until just hours before Tuesday's deadline for the state to have a budget in place.

The proposals didn't get the job done -- California once again begins a new fiscal year without a constitutionally mandated spending plan, and the cuts proposed at the 11th hour by the minority party seem to fall short of closing the state's budget gap. But at least the suggestions offer insight into the party's spending priorities.

Corrections would take a hit. That's actually not a bad idea; state spending on incarceration has risen much faster than spending in other sectors, driven by a combination of political pandering to the powerful prison guards' union and get-tough-on-crime laws that have crammed cellblocks with minor offenders. Early release for a few thousand marijuana users would save the state millions of dollars a year and pose less of a threat to public health and safety than the activity of cigarette smokers and alcohol users.

Other proposals put forward on Monday paint a less responsible picture of the Republican caucus, which adamantly opposes any tax increases to balance the budget, and without whose members no spending plan can be approved. Perhaps the most offensive is one to delay the age at which children enter kindergarten, saving an estimated $600 million.

The year without kindergarten? It sounds like a children's fairy tale -- one of the nightmarish ones by the Brothers Grimm. Keeping as many as 110,000 children out of school for an extra year would do two things: It would squander a crucial year of intellectual stimulation during the most important developmental phase for young brains, possibly guaranteeing an insurmountable educational setback for an entire generation of children. And it would force tens of thousands of working families to scramble to find child care -- expensive and in too-short-supply -- for an additional year.

Other proposed spending cuts also would weigh heavily on education, including tremendous hits to the University of California and California State University that would be the equivalent of shuttering a large campus in each system.

Cutting education in such a fashion is the equivalent of what farmers used to call "eating the seed corn." The true foundation of California's economic health is its well-educated work force and the technological edge granted the state by its unparalleled system of public higher education. To seek crippling cuts in school spending in order to fashion a short-term budget solution does damage to the state's long-term economic prospects.

Also singled out for special treatment in the Republican budget plan are the aged, blind and disabled, who would lose $1.2 billion in cost-of-living adjustments to the grants that help them survive. It escapes us how that could be considered morally preferable to a temporary half-cent increase in the sales tax -- a sensible deficit-closing suggestion the Republican caucus refuses to accept as a matter of "principle."

If nothing else, the last-minute posturing makes clear that there are no easy ways to close the state's multibillion-dollar budget gap. After spending months calling for cuts in the budget's waste and fat, the Republican caucus on Monday offered Californians a vegetarian menu --one that cuts out meat and bone.