With state government’s budget process, forget vision and courage, characteristics always misattributed to faulty policy premises and tax increases. As the budget process has just made all its participants ridiculous, what state government needs most is mere competence.

This year’s process began with Gov. Dannel P. Malloy’s submission of a budget that inadvertently exceeded the state spending cap, financed raises for state and municipal employees by slashing support for the neediest, and canceled tax cuts that had been scheduled. Though the governor’s party, the Democratic Party, controls the General Assembly, his budget was dead on arrival there and he didn’t care. He said the budget was now the legislature’s problem.

Democratic legislative leaders responded by restoring funding for the neediest without cutting anything else and by resolving upon big tax increases, which they negotiated with the governor, figuring that he never meant his campaign pledge last year not to raise taxes.

The legislature’s Republican minority proposed restoring support for the neediest and finding the money through contract concessions to be obtained by the governor from the state employee unions. The Republicans knew such concessions would be impossible to achieve in time without repealing collective bargaining and binding arbitration for government employees, which they declined to propose.

Having induced Democratic legislative leaders to look like they were forcing him to raise taxes, the governor agreed with them to finance the status quo through big increases in business taxes. They dumped their tax plan on the legislature just days before adjournment and there were no hearings on it. Financed this way, the budget was adopted narrowly, and the governor praised it as the portent of a golden age.

Then several big corporations exploded, threatening or seeming to threaten to move out of state, prompting the governor to propose rewriting the budget to reduce the business tax increases and to authorize him to cut spending at his discretion by 1.5 percent.

That put legislative leaders in a sulk, with the Senate chairman of the Appropriations Committee, Beth Bye, D-West Hartford, openly criticizing the governor. Leaders of the state-financed organizations ministering to the neediest complained as well, fearing that, with more discretionary authority, the governor would slash them again.

This week hospitals announced big layoffs, citing cuts in state support. The state auditors questioned millions of dollars in payments to supposedly disabled former state employees because their qualifications have not been rechecked regularly as required. The state comptroller said this results from state government’s failure to negotiate qualification terms with the state employee unions, on whose sufferance everything in state government now depends.

So just days ahead of the new fiscal year, it’s not clear if state government has a budget.

The governor first said he would sign the budget he negotiated with his party’s legislative leaders. Now he wants changes they don’t want. Will they negotiate changes and modify the budget at a special session of the legislature in time for the new fiscal year? Will the governor let the budget become law without his signature? Or does he want those changes enough to veto the budget? Will there be public hearings and ordinary deliberation this time?

Most important, will anyone in authority notice that more than half of state government’s appropriations and about 70 percent of municipal appropriations are “fixed costs” determined by union contract or entitlement law and thus placed outside the democratic process and beyond control, and that nothing in state government can be fixed until the “fixed costs” are unfixed?

As long as state employees keep getting Columbus Day off with pay, no one at the Capitol will be even trying.