Pennsylvania lawmakers argue about many things, oftentimes ad nauseam, especially about the state budget that seldom is finished on time, or even rendered close to being completed by what is supposed to be the June 30 deadline.

Every year this same commonwealth question “bubbles to the top” of public comment and discussion regarding the commonwealth’s annual spending plan: “When is it going to be finished this year and how much will playing petty politics stymie a timely completion of this vital legislative duty that affects so much of what will happen in the state, going forward?”

There ought to be an unrevokable financial penalty for failing to adhere to responsibility for meeting this most basic of time requirements. Yet, year after year, lawmakers ignore the June 30 deadline, almost as if it doesn’t exist.

It does in fact exist and, when a budget package hangs in limbo, it has negative impacts on the governmental-related entities that rely on the funding that the budget will provide over the coming fiscal year, which in Pennsylvania happens to be July 1 through June 30.

Not only does the state’s educational system suffer, but virtually all other governmental departments and related agencies and the people who must figure out how to carry out their official duties without knowing exactly the amount of resources with which they will have to work.

Most other states pass their budgets without the consternation that usually is in play here; Pennsylvania ought to follow their example and stop “playing games” with the taxpayers’ reasonable expectations.

While the budget incompletion “digs in,” lawmakers’ attention is diverted from working on possible remedies for problems that should be addressed expeditiously.

One such example can be seen in western Pennsylvania’s like one current need in Antis Township. Antis Township needs a stoplight at the dangerous intersection of Stadium Drive and East Pleasant Valley Boulevard, where people have been killed or injured seriously and damage has been extensive — a stoplight whose estimated cost of at least $300,000 would, without financial help from the state or federal government, wreak havoc on the township’s own annual spending responsibilities.

This state has the resources and stability to make such funding available, but that doesn’t happen when lawmakers’ time in the state capital is consumed by blaming one another for what is not getting done — while simply looking in a mirror would identify the culprits.

Yet, elected officials’ attention, especially on the state level, is glued to many less important needs not affecting people’s lives.

Lawmakers and the state’s executive branch need to rethink their priorities, but whether that’s possible is open to conjecture.