IT’S HARD TO IMAGINE a worse way to set priorities and spend money than the one our state has long used. The budget is built on incrementalism, with a strong bias toward doing everything we’ve always done, and doing it the same way we’ve always done it.

Gov. Mark Sanford has tried to change that by looking at the government as a whole rather than at individual state agencies, and making spending decisions that he believes will best accomplish the goals of the state, without regard to how they affect those agencies. That’s a hard sell in the Legislature, both because it’s such a radical change and because it requires lawmakers to make unpopular decisions.

But a proviso in the budget bill House members take up today could help change that. It creates a Joint Committee on Activity Based Budgeting to explore ways to write a budget that focuses on goals — say, reducing teen pregnancy — rather than agencies. The three senators, three representatives and three gubernatorial appointees on the panel would look for a budget-writing process that will “reduce duplication of government services, maximize cost-efficiencies and still continue to provide excellent customer services.”

South Carolina has had more than its share of special committees set up by the Legislature to study some complex problem that lawmakers were unwilling or unable to tackle, from government restructuring to tax reform. So it’s tempting to dismiss this latest initiative as either a well-intentioned waste of time or a not-so-well-intentioned distraction. But we’re not ready to do that — because we can’t. If we think we’ve got problems in this state now, imagine what they would be like if nobody was even trying to address them.