Rather than listen to another year’s worth of pointless arguments over the state budget, a nonpartisan group in Portland recently came up with the very good idea of making those arguments much more pointed. Painfully so for some, if used properly.

Its timing couldn’t have been better. Even as Republicans and the governor’s office don’t agree on how much the state collects in taxes because they don’t agree on what counts as a tax, reform of the budget document is on the way and the current budget process, introduced the same year as Roosevelt’s Rural Electrification project, may soon be modernized.

This may sound like wonk fantasy camp, but here’s why it matters: When legislators spend their time fighting over the definitions they cannot sort out policy; when they lack a good yardstick for success, any reform seems as good as another; when they can hide behind obscure budget mechanisms, the public cannot participate in its own democracy.

The absence of agreement on taxes is part politics and part a problem of definitions. Rep. David Trahan, a Republican from Waldoboro, tried sorting it out beginning last summer and still seems amazed by the difficulty. Where he saw $900 million in taxes raised since 2003, the governor’s office says it was $239 million. The ensuing disagreement, which has continued for months, helped inspire Michael Moore, director of the Maine Public Spending Research Group in Portland, to draft a proposal to hold a public session with legislators this spring where they would debate what mattered in budgeting. From that, his group would create a small, specific set of measures everyone could follow so that the simple arguments of definitions gave way to the much more interesting arguments of policy.

There are conservative and liberal ideas at risk in such an exercise, as there should be. The goal of Moore’s proposal is not to end debate but deepen it. Especially in an age of term limits, a closely divided Legislature and increasingly skilled lobbying groups, starting with good data so the debate produces something more than noise is essential. Which would you rather hear your legislator explain: whether or not Dirigo health care’s “savings offset payment” should be booked as a tax or how state government should improve medical coverage?

In a draft of his idea, Moore writes, “politicians and citizens are able to make competing cases about the budget because many of the key elements are poorly defined.” The administration’s director of state planning, Martha Freeman, concurs, “We need to stop debating the data and start talking about who we are as a state.” And Rep. Josh Tardy, assistant Republican leader in the House, adds, “The public has a right to understand what the budget includes and what it means.”

Budget work is complex and time consuming. I don’t envy lawmakers who are rushed from the moment a session begins. Time outside the session to work out how to think about the budget – in a way, to set the ground rules for debate – should free legislators to engage in the kinds of arguments that are an essential part of testing ideas. An example of this occurred last summer when members of the Appropriations Committee of both parties met to figure out how to make the budget easier to read. Currently, for instance, a department’s previous year’s spending is in one place along with proposed increases; proposed cuts are in a second place; new programs, in a third.

After four or five days of give and take, they produced the outline of a new budget that puts all the numbers together, beginning with a summary for each section titled “What the budget purchases,” followed by a logical accounting of expenses. This will seem like a small change, but it may make the difference between the public – and some lawmakers – understanding and not understanding how tax dollars are being spent.

The other budget change is even more substantial: It recognizes that every year Maine argues over millions or tens of millions of dollars in budget changes while ignoring the hundreds of millions or billions that are already in the budget. The state’s Commission to Reform the State Budget Process wants to focus on the bigger number by starting with zero.

A couple of decades ago, the idea of zero-based budgeting seemed radical; now versions of it are fairly mainstream, but Maine has stuck with a process that state budget officer Ryan Low dates to about 1935. Maine doesn’t have the resources to examine every cost in every department during each budget, as this process suggests, but it could apply top-to-bottom scrutiny to departments, say, every three or four budget cycles. It may also find that it does not need to begin at zero, just a number substantially below current spending. But for now at least, starting with zero would be a way to look for savings.

Combined, these various changes should reveal the state budget in ways the public hasn’t seen before. Once that happens, programs, behind which sit policies resting on beliefs about the role of government, are exposed. Then the points are sharpened, and the real debate begins.

Todd Benoit is the editorial page editor of the Bangor Daily News.