Governor Sonny Perdue dropped his usual talk on budget and policy in his last annual State of the State address.  Instead he suggested that the current economic recession could be the hardest ever challenge to Georgia. 

Perdue first evoked Thomas Paine's The Crisis, written during the Revolutionary War: "These are the times that try men's' souls … but he that stands [it] now deserves the love and thanks of man and woman, … yet we have this consolation."

But neither those nor the Civil War nor any war of the 20th century were the darkest days of the republic, Perdue said.   

In fact, the worst is today's threat that one generation could drop "the yoke" and leave burdens to the next generation

"The economic storm we now find ourselves in, it's like nothing we've ever seen."

If we fail to do the hard thing now, our government will be spread too thin to make sure that Georgia is more educated and continues to grow," he said, in a year when state spending may have to be cut about eight percent.

"We need to avoid the temptation to serve the needs and wants of today at the expense of tomorrow," he said, denouncing" crushing entitlements and unfunded mandates."

Perdue quoted Alexis de Toqueville's ideas about the rise of civilizations to wealth and ease and subsequent decline in order to suggest that the United States might anytime fall into "bondage."

One of the few policies he mentioned was the so-called IE Squared program, which allows local control over some school policies like class size.  He praised it and his new proposal that teachers be paid at least in part on merit. 

He also said Georgia's budget for persons with developmental disabilities will rise by $20 million this year.  The state mental hospital system has been under a court order since 2007 to improve its facilities after the AJC documented several years of mysterious deaths, rapes and neglect in several hospitals.   

Perdue also suggested that people should be content only with "what they really need" and "reject the gluttonous instinct of the age."

Unusually, Perdue's draft budget was not released ahead of the speech.

However, spending will need to shrink by as much as $1.5 billion, according to Lieutenant Governor Casey Cagle in remarks this week.  The first version of the FY 2010 budget allowed $18.6 billion in spending. 

The governor will release his budget proposals on Friday.