Completion of the state budget makes it feel as if some great weight has been lifted, and for municipal officials worried about their budgets and levies that's certainly the case. But for the rest of us the stress will remain because the real issue underlying this budget struggle has not been resolved.

The budget agreed on Friday by political leaders drops some items, keeps others, and it increases state spending by 6.6 percent over two years, which will approximately matches the recent increases in the urban cost of living. That's a good compromise. It generally keeps what we have at a time when the economy is a little uncertain.

What is unfortunate is that what seemed a sensible solution - splitting many of the differences down the middle - took so very long to accomplish. This where the real issue comes into play. That real issue is an attempt by both liberals and conservatives to tip the long-term balance of political power in their direction. It's the same issue which underlay the 2004 presidential and will be in evidence again during the presidential election a year from now.

There is no question that as a society we are politically undecided, as evidenced by the split Legislature and by the slim majority in favor of John Kerry in the last presidential election. (He won Wisconsin by about 11,384 votes, or three-tenths of 1 percent.) Hence we have much screaming as extremists try to assemble support for their view of the world.

In a September article on the ascent and fall of Karl Rove, Joshua Green wrote in The Atlantic that Rove believed he could force a societal shift like those which in the past had resulted in semipermanent political majorities. But his proposals, such as one to privatize Social Security, crumbled in the face of public opposition.

Yet both sides still desire that lasting majority. Thus we have one side trying to attract support with vows against new taxes, although reality dictates that the alternative is higher old taxes because the commitments we have can't be capriciously disassembled. The other side had the lure of new programs, in particular a whole new state health system which was drafted quietly and suddenly appeared in the budget.

Privately Wisconsin legislators would say they knew what would solve the budget impasse. They just couldn't do it because they knew that any whisper of compromise would cause an immediate attack by their party extremists, and that would endanger the legislators' chances of retaining power in the next election.

These difficulties will not end until we can make up our collective mind about how to balance the need for government services with the desire to pay less in taxes. Wisconsin is more complicated than the simple stereotypes of Taxocrats or Republican'ts. Our first task should be getting past the simplistic slogans. Our second task, and we have a year, is to realize that we can't have everything we want and that we must decide what we really want. If we can make that decision, government and budgets will be easy.