California government’s level of fiscal irresponsibility in recent years gives new meaning to the word “chronic.”

Remember earlier this year, when the Legislature sank into a blue funk — interrupted only by episodes of fierce bipartisan, politics-driven cage fighting — then reached a miraculous budget compromise when our own Sen. Abel Maldonado became a crucial swing vote?

They thought they had solved a $24 billion budget-deficit problem.

Now, four months later, the solution seems to have become almost as bad as the original problem. The Legislature’s chief budget analyst announced this week that state government is facing a new, but certainly not much improved budget hole. This one is a projected to be $21 billion deep.

The budget analysis comes from a supposedly nonpartisan agency, and should thus be free of the political baggage that hampers our lawmakers in their ruminations over budgeting and spending strategies.

This latest fiscal blow is a result of the usual dynamic, at the core of which is that Democrats and Republicans in the Senate and Assembly can’t seem to get along. That political dividing line is accompanied by a sluggish state economy that is strangling the usual tax revenue streams.

But the heart of this problem has been, is and will continue to be our lawmakers’ functional incapacity to set realistic budget parameters. If it makes sense, they won’t do it. Vegas won’t even take odds against that reality.

Other factors leading to the gloomy fiscal report include spending reductions that are being challenged in court by those whose pocketbooks are being snatched, and the Obama administration’s belief that the recession is winding down, which to them means states no longer need stimulus funding help.

California’s government seems determined to prove the feds wrong.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is only a few weeks away from presenting his final budget proposal to the Legislature, and if that $21 billion deficit figure holds up, you can bet Californians are in for another few months of hand-wringing and finger-pointing in Sacramento.

And programs that depend on state funding can look forward to more across-the-board funding cuts.

Eventually, California’s policy makers will have to devise a blueprint for state government to live within its means — the old family budget gimmick of not spending more than you earn. The problem is, we just don’t see when that “eventually” might be.