Trying to predict what the Senate Democrats are going to throw into their upcoming jobs bill is a fool's game at this point. On the one hand, there are too many valuable uses for the money.  On the other hand, there are too many deficit hawks in the upper chamber trying to clamp down on the amount of resources the federal government is willing to invest. A convincing case can be made for wide array of individual policies, so the Democratic lawmakers writing the bill -- Sens. Dick Durbin and Byron Dorgan -- should have a lot of flexibility in what they choose to include.

Even so, there are a few ideas that deserve to be prioritized. Federal assistance for state governments should be at the top of the list. Even with the hefty aid passed along via the economic stimulus package, at least 42 states have had to impose cuts that harm vulnerable residents. Tax receipts aren't rebounding substantially either, so state legislators will be forced to make even more drastic service cuts or tax hikes when the initial stimulus aid expires in FY 2011.

On Monday, Capitol Fax's Rich Miller reiterated a point he's made before and one that continues to escape tax-averse lawmakers from both parties: If the next state budget does not generate new revenue, core social services in Illinois will be eviscerated:

Here's the "truth:" Most of the budget is education and health care. So, unless you want to cut most of the $8 billion in state kindergarten to grade 12 spending (which would just necessitate insanely high local property taxes) and kick tens and tens of thousands of children and poor people off of Medicaid, dump the mentally ill into the streets and then quit doing the other things that the state does, like patrol the highways, you can forget about balancing the budget.

Yet to hear McKenna and the other GOP candidates talk, all that's really required is a nip here and a tuck there. Ridiculous.

So what are the chances that Democrats in Washington will lend a temporary helping hand to our representatives in Springfield? Noam Scheiber's interview yesterday with Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND), chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, sheds a little bit of positive light:

CONRAD: I think there’s strong consensus in the short-term about the need to do more things that generate jobs. The things that have the most support are infrastructure, aid to states--the states are laying off people--and some kind of jobs credit [presumably a tax credit] to small business.

SCHEIBER: I thought aid to states was going nowhere on the Hill?

CONRAD: It is tough. But ... most economists say it’s one of the things you could do that would have the most rapid turn-around. The reason is clear. A lot of states are in an extreme situation. They have constitutional balanced budget requirements. They're laying off people. We don’t want them doing that. We want them working on roads, bridges, airports…

"Tough" is certainly better than "off the table."

Image used under a Creative Commons license by Flickr user Sean_Marshall.