IT’S HARD NOT TO be inspired by the decision of our state’s leading business people and organizations to turn their political focus from their immediate bottom lines to the fact that South Carolinians make just 82 cents for every dollar people in the rest of the country make. They correctly believe that we need to create and lure not just more jobs, but more jobs that pay higher wages. They wisely seek knowledge-based jobs.

Many of their proposals are contained in a bill the House will take up today. It would encourage “angels” to invest in high-tech start-ups, by giving them tax credits; set up a state program to help small businesses get loans they can’t get from banks; encourage businesses to offer medical insurance, through the use of tax credits; offer a tax credit for creating new jobs to even more companies; and attract distribution facilities by exempting their products from sales taxes based solely on the fact that they pass through the state.

For all its potential, though, there are significant problems with the bill, because of what it doesn’t do.

In its promotional materials, the business coalition sensibly notes that “with more than 80 percent of jobs in South Carolina generated through small or existing businesses, they should receive priority for incentives aimed ultimately at bringing the state’s per capita income in line with the national average.”

But this proposal doesn’t begin such a shift. It simply creates new incentives for small businesses, without scaling back or eliminating some of the incentives we offer to larger businesses.

Many of the new incentives are appropriately tied to wages: Pay high wages, or offer good benefits, and you get tax incentives; pay low wages, and you don’t. But the legislation does nothing about the fact that too many existing business incentives are available for new jobs that don’t pay so well.

Moreover, some business groups warn that tax credits, which come after the fact, don’t offer much help to struggling start-up businesses; this should at least raise the question of whether there are more effective ways to accomplish the goal.

As we have said over and over, we believe it is unwise to keep making piecemeal changes to our tax system. What we need is a comprehensive approach — one that allows us to consider, for instance, whether this particular tax break is still needed in light of that one, whether it’s fair or even smart to structure this tax break one way and that one another. Appropriately, one of the groups in the business coalition, the Palmetto Institute, has made a study of comprehensive tax reform its next big initiative.

A fundamental mark of a good tax system is that it is wide and thin — it maximizes the number of people taxed in order to keep the tax rate as low as possible. One reason our state isn’t as competitive as we’d like it to be is that our tax code is so twisted and contorted with special exemptions and exceptions that the tax rates are higher than they should be. This means that those individuals and businesses that don’t meet special legislatively written criteria for getting a break have to pay higher taxes than they would if we had a better-thought-out, more straightforward tax system.

This legislation simply exacerbates that problem.

Even if legislators can’t help themselves, if they are certain that we must act and act now to use the tax code to jump-start our economy, let’s at least look at the whole scheme of business tax incentives, and figure out which ones we should change or eliminate, before we add on yet another batch of new ones.