Remember the old saying about the dangers of being “penny wise and pound foolish”? Its truth holds whether times are good or bad, whether government is flush with revenues or pinched. All it means, after all, is that it is really dumb to concentrate on saving nickels and dimes when the stuff that costs the really big bucks is never addressed.

Another way of putting it might be that if you don’t break the back of the societal problems that are costing huge sums for dealing with the consequences, it doesn’t do a whole heck of a lot of good to sweat the little things.

And, on both local and state levels, governmental bean counters are plainly sweating the little things nowadays. Georgia isn’t talking about keeping prison population from appearing, after all, it’s talking about taking away chaplains. Man, when you get sent to prison in Georgia you really don’t have a prayer!

It’s become darn near impossible to keep tabs on the price taxpayers are now paying for constantly trying to cover gaping wounds with gauze instead of suturing them up.

This mentality seems to range across all our governmental functions. Instead of putting more money into preventive health-care services, even simple things like bad-mouthing obesity and smoking, the big tax bucks have to be spent dealing with the predictable outcomes. We lock up even relatively minor offenders in places where no rehabilitative services are offered. We’ll feed the homeless, have places for them to sleep on freezing nights, but don’t want to pay for addressing their various core problems so they can start fending for themselves again.

The list could go on and on and on. It is apparent in trauma care, mental health, juvenile justice, foster care and so forth.

Our governmental leaders try to cut back on the use of computer paper even while their core actions result in larger and larger case files.

Perhaps a moment in time when snipping budgets due to economic woes shrinking revenues is not the right one to bring up such things - but it actually is.

Not repairing known dilemmas on an individual basis - intensive, supervised rehab for the drug offender, for example - leads to higher near-perpetual costs. Sure, not all of the addicts can be successfully “fixed” but with an annual prison budget already more than $1 billion wouldn’t it be both penny wise and pound wise to spend more on smaller sums that reduce the numbers of those whom taxpayers must house and feed forever?

This line of thinking might have been triggered, as it was on our part, if more Floyd Countians had encountered an item in the Athens newspaper about Clarke County’s new mental-health court. It focuses on getting assistance, and providing intensive supervision, for those with mental conditions that cause them to constantly and repeatedly run afoul of the law.

It’s obviously a good idea and just as obviously has to have some additional cost in both money and time as court officials, lawyers, mental-health and social workers, not to mention law enforcement, concentrate on interrupting permanently, on a case by case basis, an individual pattern of behavior that regularly has cost them and the taxpayers, even more money.

These targeted courts are no longer a novelty. Floyd County’s juvenile court has been around for decades, and like the other courts aimed at interrupting cycles has been left notoriously short of actual resources to use.

The county’s judges have been talking up the idea of a “drug court” for several years now and, one assumes, lack only permanent budgetary support, particularly for the supervision/rehabilitation end. Looking at juvenile court’s travails, the judges have got reason to worry about consistent political commitments to the approach.

Even DUI offenders, whose “falling off the wagon” risk to the general public needs no explanation, continue to be dealt with via increasing fines, jail time, mandatory classes of the “alcohol is bad for you” variety instead of the one-on-one counseling to tackle the underlying problem that is probably needed to interrupt the cycle.

Still, it is worrisome that this community isn’t able to come up with the funding to try approaches known to be working in other communities - and that some, like Clarke County, appear to be expanding. Not only is a “drug court” a good idea but, in a place like Floyd County with a major public mental institution in a state with a known past neglect of its mental-health sector, such would seem an obvious call.

There’s another old adage that would seem to apply, although invented for business rather than the public sector: “You’ve got to spend money to make money.”

When it comes to criminal activity, drugs, alcohol abuse, child neglect, mental health, unhealthy physical habits and more, there has to be more money spent to break the cycles in order the save the much larger sums currently being soaked up by too little being done to defuse the expected and known consequences.

This state could, over the long haul, save billions of tax dollars annually by nothing more complicated than changing its way of thinking.

In a time of bad budgetary squeezes, perhaps it is the right time to think about such things … and start doing them.