Spend it, or save it, or do a little of both?

Those are the choices New Hampshire legislators are being asked to decide about what to do with the modest surplus the state has on its hands.

The state has about $15 million left over from the 2012-13 biennium.

House and Senate Democrats want to use some of that money – about $7 million – to forestall cuts that were built into the Health and Human Services budget.

The state ended the last fiscal year with a suplus of $72 million. The lion’s share of that – $57 million – was pumped back into the budget at the insistence of the House, which is controlled by Democrats. The Senate went along, but is balking at the latest proposal to spend the rest of the money.

Democrats argue that the state can afford to shore up HHS because revenues for the current budget are higher than where experts thought they would be: “We are currently running more than $17 million over revenue projections for 2014-15, while the economic forecasters are increasingly confident of a higher rate of growth,” wrote Reps. Susan Almy and Mary Jane Wallner, who chair the House Ways and Means and Finance committees, respectively.

We admire Democrats’ compassion for those who must rely on the state for help, but there is also something maddening about the party’s compulsion to spend money as soon as the state takes it in. Sooner, in fact, given that some of the surplus would be taken from the 2014-15 budget, which still has a long way to go.

Compounding the issue is the state’s Rainy Day Fund, about which this can be said: If economic skies turn gloomy, we had better hope that the precipitation that follows is but a sprinkle, because the state is ill-equipped to weather prolonged showers or even a heavy squall.

State Treasurer Katherine Provencher last week said that entire $15 million ought to go into the reserve fund. She said that, ideally, the state should have an amount on hand equal to about 5 percent of state revenues, or somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 million. The Rainy Day Fund now contains only $9.3 million, the lowest the account has seen in more than 20 years.

Democrats in power seem to have a limitless capacity to rationalize ways to spend other people’s money, just as Republicans seem to have demonstrated an equal capacity to say no to any spending that doesn’t help those who already have money.

In this case, however, Republicans have the much stronger argument. The state should take the entire $15 million surplus and tuck it away in the Rainy Day Fund. The budget is already set, and if the worse that could be said about our lawmakers is that they were overly cautious when it came to planning for future fiscal downturns, we think taxpayers could certainly live with that.

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