There's lots of speculation about the governor's ability to close California's multibillion-dollar budget deficit without a tax increase.

And the answer is that of course he can. With enough cuts and deferrals, it's not hard. The only question is at what long-term cost - to education, to health and social services, to transportation, to the poor, to a business climate that depends as much on good schools and roads as on low taxes - to California's overall quality of life?

Next Monday, four days after the governor will have unveiled his revised budget proposal, will mark the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the unanimous Supreme Court decision that separate public facilities are inherently unequal.

Brown gave meaning to the promise that all children, regardless of race or economic condition, could have an equal chance at quality education. That promise, despite considerable progress in the two generations since, has yet to be fulfilled.

Tomorrow's budget proposals from the office of Maria Shriver's husband will, in effect, declare that the kids will have to wait some more.

Because funding for the state's universities already has been cut, fees increased, access curtailed, some 10,000 California students have already gotten those good news-bad news letters, telling them they're in at a four-year university but, actually, they'll have to start at a community college.

That's not an unmitigated disaster. For many it might even be the best course. But it's a long way from the shining model that California represented in the golden years that the governor remembers so fondly from the time when he first arrived in California.

California has the nation's pre-eminent public higher education system. The state's economy grew great on its research, its pre-eminent faculty and its magnetic attraction to modern business and industry. It wouldn't take long to reduce it to, say, the level of the University of Florida, where California's director of finance last wielded her ax.

The governor promises to restore the universities' funding next year, but where will the money come from? That the cutting occurs precisely at a time when an overwhelming majority of California's students are what used to be called minorities make the Brown anniversary particularly ironic. It's on these students' skills that our future economy depends.

In 1996, we banned the use of race preferences in college admission with the implicit promise that opportunities would be provided for black and Latino students to compete evenly for the privileged places at places such as Berkeley and UCLA.

But that hasn't yet begun to happen.

California's public schools remain stuck with their sub-par funding - 30th, roughly, among the states in per-pupil funding, but near last when calculated against the state's cost of living. The budget that comes from the governor's office tomorrow is not going to change that.

On the contrary, "no-new-taxes" is likely to swamp most other priorities - for children's health, for Medi-Cal, for a long list of social services. Indeed, with the governor's unilateral cut in the vehicle license fee, his budget actually includes a $4 billion tax cut.

Side deals have been done with the California Teachers Association, which will get more money on the bargaining table for its members, but allow the governor to defer some $2 billion more that's constitutionally due to the schools to some future date. Where will that money come from?

The administration also has made a deal with the cities, counties and special districts under which they'll give up another $1.3 billion in each of the coming two years and abandon the initiative they've already submitted for the November ballot.

In return, they'd get gubernatorial support on yet another never-again ballot measure prohibiting the state from grabbing any more of the locals' money after 2005-06. But the agreement, by locking up certain sales tax revenues for the cities, will make any genuine reform of the state's misshapen tax system that much harder.

A deal also is in the works with the Indians for a bigger cut of their casino revenues in return for a vast expansion of gambling and elimination of the few controls on casinos the state still has.

Some critics of the governor complain that all these cuts and deferrals - plus the almost certain inclusion of a long list of budget gimmicks, rollovers and bets-on-the-come - bear a strong resemblance to the ugly smoke-and-mirrors budgets of the past. This governor has more I-owe-yous out than Harry the horse.

But in the governor's widespread deal-making with big interest groups, and the initiative politics that the governor is not alone in playing, the administration is also developing a surreal pattern of governance - part populism, part will-to-dominance power plays, part closed-door bargaining - that you won't find in any civics textbook.

If there's method in this madness, it's the governor's laudable hope that anything that restores confidence is better than gridlock and partisan fights. But a lot of people are already paying the price and many more will in the coming years. "No new taxes" is not the law of gravity.