THE SENATE FINANCE Committee greatly improved the governor’s plan to cut the income tax, demanding a higher rate of revenue growth each year before the tax rate could be rolled back, and eliminating a provision that required the first cut next year.

So at least this revised proposal wouldn’t cause the state to fall as much farther behind on funding essential services, and might even give us an opportunity to bring some of those services back up to a basic level.

But this is still a plan whose time has not come.

Gov. Mark Sanford says cutting the income tax rate is essential to attracting businesses to the state and encouraging South Carolinians to start and grow their own businesses. And we have no doubt that lower taxes would help with all of those things — as long as lower taxes don’t result in our basic infrastructure crumbling. But it almost certainly will. Even if lowering the income tax would eventually generate enough economic activity to make up the difference in tax revenue, the effect would be delayed. And we’re not confident that many people want to invest in a state that can’t educate its children well enough to produce a competent workforce, that can’t keep its prisons — and therefore its communities — safe and secure, that can’t patch its potholes and improve dangerous roads and adequately police those roads.

The idea that South Carolinians are overtaxed is by no means fact. We pay, on average, a lower percentage of our income in taxes than people in 40 states; add in fees, and we still pay less than 19 states.

That’s not to say that some taxes aren’t too high. Clearly, some are. Just as clearly, some are too low.

The way you fix the problem — particularly when you are not collecting enough money to pay for basic services — is not by lowering an individual tax. It’s by lowering some taxes while raising others; in other words, overhauling the tax system.

Such a comprehensive approach also allows for more complicated changes than simply raising or lowering tax rates. And that might be what is needed with the income tax, which looks much higher than it actually is.

While our income tax rate is among the highest in the nation, our effective tax rate — the percentage of our incomes that we pay in taxes — ranks somewhere between the middle and the bottom nationally, depending on how you do the calculations. This is because we have so many exemptions, credits and deductions. If the goal is to convince outsiders to take a serious look at South Carolina rather than simply marking us off the list because we seem to have such high income taxes, we might be better off eliminating enough of those exemptions that we can lower the rate, and still bring in the same amount of money.

This state desperately needs an overhaul of our tax code — and some sort of change in the income tax should be part of that overhaul. But it should only be part of it. Until the Legislature is willing to do the entire job, it needs to stop tinkering around the edges. That’s a recipe for bad policy that damages our state.