If anything symbolizes the national pandemic of living beyond our means, it's using plastic to make our purchases. That some in Harrisburg now see that as one way out of the state's budget mess is the definition of irony.

What's even more surprising, they could be right.

Rep. John Bear, a second-term Republican from the picturesque little borough of Lititz in Lancaster County, was a management consultant before he became a lawmaker. Mr. Bear says government is "usually 10 years behind the private sector." Private industry uses p-cards, or purchasing cards, to get bank rebates all the time, but our state government has been more timid.

The state sometimes uses a PNC Bank purchasing card to buy goods and services, getting a rebate of roughly 1.5 percent for those buys. It made $141 million in purchases with the card in the 12 months ending last September, according to Mr. Bear. That sounds like a lot, but it's a fraction of the $7 billion that the budget office folks say is spent on goods and services in a year.

Still, that was enough for the state to earn more than $2 million in bank rebates for using the card, Mr. Bear said. (That's even better than my FuelPerks savings.)

So, Mr. Bear asks, why not use the card for, say, 20 percent of state purchases in return for tens of millions of dollars in rebates? Heck, why not use it for 50 percent or 70 percent?

Mr. Bear pointed me to the West Virginia State Auditor's Office, which boasts of saving the state millions of dollars through its purchasing cards. Almost half the state's purchases are made on them, and West Virginia has reduced the number of checks printed by 500,000 per year.

So it would seem even the Mountaineers are more sophisticated in the financial arena than we are in the Keystone State.

Some of this also seems to be in the too-good-to-be-true category. Do you know anyone who really turned his financial life around by accepting the credit-card come-on, "Turn everyday purchases into extraordinary rewards"? There's also the fear that if these cards aren't policed properly, they're more likely to be misused than if the state were cutting checks. Some PennDOT employees were caught misusing purchasing cards in 2001 and 2002.

Mr. Bear says one method of payment can be as easily policed as the other, but a spokeswoman for the budget office said the Rendell administration is wary of the increased potential for fraud and abuse with p-cards. There are also vendors who won't accept them because of the fees involved.

That said, the administration is interested in some expansion of the use of p-cards, spokeswoman Susan Hooper said. The state already has been streamlining by turning thousands of paper utility invoices into a handful of monthly electronic invoices, among other changes. The budget office has 200 fewer people than it had at the start of the Rendell administration, a reduction of 23 percent, she said.

Mr. Bear says the Rendell administrators are "just not thinking as big as we are." Additional use of p-cards would not require any legislative action, and he calls it "a non-partisan, no-brainer kind of issue."

In addition to the rebates themselves, the state could save money in administrative costs because there would be fewer checks to process. Mr. Bear also thinks greater volume might bring a better rebate return from PNC or another bank.

A PNC spokesman said the bank would not comment on "a client issue," but taxpayers can only hope that Mr. Bear is on to something. The state's looking at a $1 billion budget shortfall, which sounds more like a longfall. If defter use of plastic cards can save tens of millions of dollars, that beats raising taxes.

I don't think any Pennsylvanians will believe it until they see it, but maybe this will be the start of a trend. If reward cards work out for the state, maybe it can borrow other items familiar to the workaday consumer.

Could we get a little punch card from the auto companies? Buy 10 state police cars and get the 11th one free.