Read his lips: No new taxes.

What is generally expected to be an encore presentation of last year’s Quixotic state budget impasse just got a little more interesting. On Tuesday morning Gov. Tom Wolf said that he would no longer seek increases to Pennsylvania’s income or sales taxes to fund his $33.3 billion budget proposal.

“I think we can do all this — a balanced budget, an increase in education and the heroin initiatives — without a broad-based tax increase,” Wolf said.

It’s an unexpected about-face for a pugnacious governor who, just months ago, seemed to be spoiling for another fight with the Legislature. In his February budget address the governor was less than optimistic about the Pennsylvania’s fiscal future. Wolf lambasted the General Assembly as progenitors of Pennsylvania’s fiscal woes, and said he would continue to seek tax increases and a so-called severance tax on gas and oil drillers to right the ship.

That provoked a predictable response from Republican legislators, who called the governor’s comments a partisan political attack, his tax proposals job-killers, and his spending plan an irresponsible big-government fantasy.

Of course, they managed to lob those grenades from deep within their own rabbit hole — a place where privatizing wine sales and legalizing online gaming will somehow solve the state’s budget crisis.

Even under the rosiest of predictions, those two moves will generate $300 to $400 million per year starting next year. And that doesn’t even account for the damage online gambling would likely do to the 11 brick-and-mortar casinos across the state.

It all makes for an interesting thought experiment. But everyone needs to answer the same question: where is the money actually going to come from, and how does it get spent?

There’s plenty of red ink to go around here in Pennsylvania: A structural budget deficit of at least $1.8 billion; a grievously underfunded education system that needs between $3 and $4 billion in extra cash; a state pension system that is expected to cost $200 billion over the next three decades; and millions in fuel taxes and motorist fees that were intended for use on our ailing transportation infrastructure, but are being diverted to shore up the Pennsylvania State Police instead.

Meanwhile AP writer Marc Levy writes that the two sides haven’t even come to an agreement on the most basic item: how much to spend overall next year.

There is now little more than a week — eight days — until Pennsylvania’s July 1 budget deadline. The last time we were here, it was the beginning of a painful 9-month slog that cost taxpayers millions in interest payments and achieved little — if anything at all — in the meantime.

In other words, the budget we paid for last year cost too much and achieved far too little. Both parties risk damaging real achievements from the past year — medical marijuana legalization, a fair school funding formula and minor pension reform — if they haven’t learned from past mistakes.