Last week, as the Missouri Legislature was finishing work on the $22.5 billion 2009 state budget, an independent analysis of Missouri tax collections suggested that the state could find itself $500 million in the hole some time next year. The state’s general revenue fund declined by 9.8 percent in April, the 10th month of Missouri’s fiscal year — and usually the biggest month of the year for tax collections.

Tom Kruckemeyer, chief economist for the nonpartisan Missouri Budget Project, said that the decline in revenue collections — coupled with the national economic slump and tax cuts enacted in 2007 — means that Missouri “almost certainly will face a budget shortfall of nearly $500 million in fiscal 2010.” Fiscal 2010 begins July 1, 2009.

In other words, whoever becomes governor of Missouri in January is going to face a major financial crisis in his or her first year in office. So we called Bob Holden to ask if he’d heard that song before. Mr. Holden might be finishing his second term as governor right now, had he not faced a major financial crisis in the first months of his first term in 2001.

“Everybody knew it was going to be bad back then, but nobody knew just how bad,” said Mr. Holden, now the director of a public policy program at Webster University. Mr. Holden barely had time to sit down in his chair in the governor’s office in January 2001 before he had to make emergency cuts in that year’s budget.

Over the next four years, Mr. Holden had to cut $1.2 billion in state spending, a big reason he lost his bid for renomination as the Democratic candidate for governor in 2004 to state Auditor (now U.S. Sen.) Claire McCaskill. Ms. McCaskill lost the general election to Republican Matt Blunt, who in January announced he would not seek a second term. Maybe Mr. Blunt saw the fiscal train wreck coming.

Even conservative governors such as Mr. Blunt find that cutting spending is hazardous politically. Indeed, Mr. Blunt’s decision in 2005 to cut 100,000 people from the state’s Medicaid rolls has been widely unpopular.

For a politician, the only thing worse than cutting spending is raising taxes. All three of the major candidates in this year’s governor’s race — U.S. Rep. Kenny Hulsholf and state Treasurer Sarah Steelman, both Republicans; and Attorney General Jay Nixon, a Democrat — have said they have no interest in tax hikes. But if Mr. Kruckemeyer’s analysis is correct, whoever wins the governor’s race will have to raise taxes or make $500 million worth of very nasty decisions.

That $500 million will have to come from the general revenue budget, which makes up only about a third of the overall $22.5 billion state budget. (The rest largely is funded by federal funds passed through to the state and by tax funds limited to specific applications such as highways and conservation.)

So most of the $500 million in cuts would have to come from just four programs: elementary and secondary education, higher education, corrections and human services (Medicaid and mental health).

Except for corrections, all of those programs have suffered in recent years. Increases in funding for higher education this year have managed to restore spending to the level of 2001. Cutting education funding is a sure way to cripple the state’s future. Cutting Medicaid and mental health programs, as Mr. Blunt learned, carries a heavy political penalty.

Some states — California and Rhode Island among them — have begun releasing more non-violent prisoners and using alternative-sentencing programs to cut their corrections budgets. That’s a smart alternative, and Missouri, which has been doing a little of it, should try doing a lot more. But the state won’t find $500 million worth of cuts in a $700 million corrections budget.

There’s a solution here, but it’s going to take a level of courage and bipartisanship that hasn’t been seen in Missouri in recent decades. “It’s going to take political leadership,” Mr. Holden said. “Instead of demagoguing the problem, they’re going to have to try to solve it.”