THERE’S A LOT of hope currently being expressed about the worst of the economic storm perhaps having passed. Even if this proves true, and there’s growing evidence to that effect, it’s rather like being in the eye of a hurricane. The back end of the storm still has to pound the area.

Unemployment is expected to increase for perhaps another year and, particularly bad for about 1.5 million of the now long unemployed, even the extended jobless benefits are going to soon run out. Recovery can be expected to be slow and getting “back to where we were” probably isn’t going to happen for a considerable time. Even Democrats, who will now soon claim all their spending has done the job, should refrain from breaking into “Happy Days Are Here Again” since, at best, what may be here again will at best be more bearable days for those who managed to hang on to their jobs.

Unfortunately, for Georgians, it may turn out to be a bit like staggering out onto a battered landscape only to instantly hear a cry of “Tornado!”

Public officials are already trying to prepare citizens for what they foresee, on the governmental front, as even worse things despite the winds of upheaval dying down.

That’s because Georgia — and it is far from alone among the states — has been to some extent eating the seed corn. With less planted, even a bountiful harvest won’t be enough to go around.

IT SEEMS that Georgia has been taking much of the billions in federal stimulus money, intended to jumpstart the economy and create jobs, and using it instead to fill budgetary gaps in existing programs. Odd as it may seem to say it, even with staffing reductions and furloughs in place the public-sector mayhem would have been greater without this diversion of assistance from Washington.

In a sense, states such as Georgia — it has used 43 percent of its federal stimulus money to plug gaps in the budget, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCLS) — have kept their own government workforces going by reducing the chances for those in the private sector to find work. As David Moellering, executive director of the Georgia Highway Contractors, put it: “We have not seen the stimulus create any new jobs. We have only seen a suppression of layoffs.”

Georgia’s choice of using the federal money to keep what’s already there rather than build new employment opportunities is hardly unique, or even the largest. It’s 97 percent in Texas, home of the governor who wants to secede from the Union. How’s he going to keep Texas going without federal billions if he succeeds?

It’s estimated that, across all 50 states, most of their $275 billion in stimulus money disbursements will go to bail out themselves, not the free-enterprise system. In Georgia even the supposed “shovel ready” highway projects haven’t been there because the state took its own funds away and instead diverted the federal largesse to cover projects already ongoing.

THERE’S A TICKING time bomb attached to all this. In a sense, bad as the economic hurricane has been, many Americans will learn they have been sheltered from it by a house of cards.

According to Kathy Cox, the state school superintendent, some $2.5 billion in supposed stimulus money has gone to plug holes in education funding alone. Given that, as all know, on top of this the schools have still suffered deep cuts, and now even teacher furloughs, the damage done by the plunge in state tax collections is really extensive even though the impact is now masked.

Even assuming a slow and steady recovery, no doubt lasting for years before revenues return to past levels, what could happen next, in the imagery of the NCLS, will be like the states falling off a cliff. Indeed, this goes a long way toward explaining why there is already constant talk about the federal government perhaps needing to provide a “second stimulus.” It wouldn’t be so much intended for President Obama’s envisioned “green economy” as to keep the bare-cupboard states from either decimating their surviving payrolls ... or sharply increasing their state taxes.

Georgia is, right now, at least $5 billion short of what it expected to collect annually in taxes before the economic implosion. Not only that but this state wasn’t exactly meeting known needs in critical areas even at the previous level.

Once the federal money disappears, $5 billion would be one heck of a tax increase to find — or one gigantic elimination of ... what? There are very few possible targets of such a size, with education and/or health care among them. Even closing all the prisons and releasing all the convicts would only “save” $1 billion a year.

GIVEN MOST Georgians will be unsheltered from the storm when the back side of this hurricane hits sometime next year, or in 2011, it is rather amazing that anyone, Republican and Democrat alike, is actually thinking of running for office in order to win the opportunity to be blamed for it.