Some good emerged from the 2010 budget approved by the House last week, not least being lawmakers’ willingness to make important changes to the $7.76 billion spending plan. Too often the powerful House Finance Committee’s budget has sailed through the General Assembly virtually unchanged.

Two million dollars needed for the R.I. Economic Development Corporation was restored. Another $650,000 to fund the office of R.I. Health Insurance Commissioner Christopher Koller was added back, along with other changes.

And lawmakers beat back an attempt to freeze the alternative flat tax, which benefits the kind of high-wage earners that generate jobs Rhode Island badly needs.

But while House leaders signaled the importance of the flat tax option in keeping Rhode Island competitive, the spending plan doesn’t do enough to ensure that in other areas.

Hiking the capital gains tax, for example, hurt’s Rhode Island’s competitiveness.

The failure to phase out the state’s corporate income tax, as Gov. Donald L. Carcieri proposed, is another lost opportunity to attract new business.

And pension changes don’t go nearly far enough to prepare for when federal bailouts won’t be there.

Perhaps filling a $587 million budget hole was too daunting a task to think about the future. Until such short-term thinking changes, Rhode Island’s losses in jobs and business growth will continue to be its neighbors’ gains. •