Apparently trying to find shelter from the storm of taxpayer wrath that will hit once Minnesotans have read their property tax statements, House Republicans have in recent days begun talking about property tax relief. The proposals to date have been far short of replacing the $600 million that the Legislature and Gov. Mark Dayton built into a last-minute budget compromise earlier this year. But the bigger lesson is that some taxpayer anger could have been avoided if the state’s politicians had been willing to work a little harder last winter.

Confronted with a $5 billion budget shortfall, lawmakers and the governor spent month after month holding tight to their respective political positions and never even came near taking a long, hard look at how Minnesota’s government is structured or how it is paid for. Instead, after a government shut down, they cobbled together a budget plan that did no more than slap a Band-Aid on the problem. Now they are forced to confront the festering problems that the Band-Aid is covering.

Earlier this week, a leading House Republican proposed a plan to provide $80 million of property tax relief, a pittance compared to the $600 million in extra expense that his colleagues and the governor delivered to taxpayers this year. Nor is the plan realistic, given that Minnesota almost certainly faces a new budget deficit.

The only answer, for either party, is to begin a ground-up restructuring of the state budget process, one which effectively ranks spending from the highest priority (education, for example) to the lowest — and which has a mechanism for effectively “drawing a line” through the priority list based on how much tax revenue is available. Otherwise, Minnesotans will be in for another round of budget tinkering and, almost certainly, results just as bad as those they are experiencing this year. The “priority ranking” approach may not be ideal. But it can be no worse than the methods lawmaker and the governor have used to date.