Everyone put the verbal guns down and take a deep breath. The budget that state legislators passed Saturday is neither the job-creating miracle legislative leaders claim nor the near-criminal attack on children that Democratic Gov. Bev Perdue suggests.

There's a whole lot of politics flying in both directions, with all eyes on the 2012 elections. The truth is that economic realities were going to force a bad budget this year whoever was in charge, and that's what we got. Republicans just made it worse than necessary by not keeping at least part of a sales tax that most North Carolinians would be OK extending.

Bill Harrison, chairman of the state school board, called the Republican budget "a disgrace" and Perdue said: "I'm so distressed about this, I just wanted you to hear the terrible disgust in my voice."

But the Republican K-12 budget spends about 99.5 percent of what Perdue proposed in her budget in February. The GOP budget overall spends $19.7 billion in the coming fiscal year. That's 1.1 percent less than what Perdue proposed. Keep those numbers in mind when you hear the rhetoric.

At the same time, Republicans are spinning as fast as they can to suggest that their budget not only doesn't hurt education but actually helps it. Their budget pushes hundreds of millions of dollars in cuts to the local level and slices more than $400 million from the University of North Carolina system.

The Republicans went after education harder than they needed to. Though their total budget is just $206 million less than Perdue's proposal, their total education budget is about $257 million less than Perdue's. Those cuts will mean thousands of teachers, teacher assistants and other school workers are likely to lose their jobs. Republicans also demonstrated that they care little about early childhood education, cutting too deeply into Smart Start and More at Four.

All that could have been avoided easily. The one-penny sales tax scheduled to expire July 1 brings in more than $1 billion a year. Keeping even a fraction of it - costing the average North Carolinian just pennies a day - would have saved those jobs.

The Republican budget has several other flaws. Among them:

It bans new state environmental rules that are tougher than federal standards. That could handcuff regulators from dealing adequately with environmental problems specific to our state.

It disallows any state money or any federal pass-through money from going to Planned Parenthood. That money is used for preventative health screenings, family planning and education. Ending it will lead to higher medical costs to the state and more unwanted pregnancies.

It cuts $750 million from Medicaid over the next two years, which will also lead to the loss of that much or more in federal money.

Finally, a word about the shameful politics being played by both sides on extending federal unemployment benefits to more than 40,000 long-term jobless residents. Republicans held the benefits hostage for seven weeks for political gain. Then, after expressing great anguish since mid-April over the people hurt by that tactic, Perdue on Friday issued an executive order to get the payments going. Perdue should have exercised that power long ago, not kept it in her pocket all this time while the people she claims to want to help suffered.