A LOT OF ENERGY will be spent speculating over the reason for -- and thus the lessons to be taken from -- Alabama voters' overwhelming rejection on Tuesday of a sweeping tax reform and tax increase package.

Whatever the right message is -- and it could be that huge tax increases are a no-no or that Alabama's government hasn't made the realistic spending cuts it reasonably can be expected to make or that supporters did a lousy job getting out their message -- doesn't really matter a lot here. Ours is a very different state with very different needs, and nothing even remotely like what was proposed in Alabama is likely even to be discussed seriously here.

What's important to us is that we understand -- and reject -- the wrong message, which many politicians will try to read into the vote: that the public won't tolerate tax reform, and that the public won't tolerate any tax increases.

There were simply too many variables in Alabama to draw those conclusions: The vote wasn't merely a matter of tax reform, but rather of tax reform as part of a massive tax increase; and there's a big difference between rejecting a massive tax increase (total state taxes would have gone up 20 percent) and rejecting any tax increase. More significantly, there is simply too much at stake here in South Carolina to let this distract us from the crucial tasks we face.

South Carolina has several major problems when it comes to the finances of operating a government:

• Our tax code is riddled with loopholes and special exemptions and convoluted formulas that have been layered atop each other in attempts to mollify the complaining constituency of the moment, without any thought to how they affect each other. Beyond that, national changes to the consumer economy are eroding the ability of our workhorse sales tax to grow at the same rate as inflation, and therefore continue to be a primary source for funding government.

• Our budgeting process discourages smart choices about the tasks government should perform, and how it should perform them. In good times, legislators accept as a given that everything state government has ever done is essential and is being done properly and therefore must continue unchanged; then they fight over how to divvy up additional revenue on new or expanded programs. In bad times, they accept as a given that everything the state government is doing is of roughly equal value and is done with an equal degree of efficiency; then they make largely indiscriminate cuts to the budget of each agency, without providing any direction as to what should be eliminated or reduced.

• The structure of our government discourages efficiency and accountability and encourages each agency to focus on its own needs rather than the needs of the entire state. While the governor has much more control now than he did a decade ago, two-thirds of the state budget still goes to agencies that operate autonomously. Some are headed by separately elected officials, some by boards appointed by small groups of legislators, often that cannot be replaced wholesale to ensure change.

While my colleagues and I have been beating our chests over these problems for more than a decade, they are finally coming to a head now because we have run out of money to continue doing business as usual. For the first time, our state's leaders are promising to address all of these problems head-on.

A committee headed by the chairmen of the Legislature's two budget-writing committees, Sen. Hugh Leatherman and Rep. Bobby Harrell, is studying the tax code with an eye toward proposing reforms for the upcoming legislative session. Gov. Mark Sanford has appointed a special panel to take a broad look at the way government does what it does and recommend sweeping changes designed to help it do those things more efficiently. And Mr. Sanford himself is digging deeply into the bowels of the budget -- and, thus, of state government itself -- with a goal of writing a revolutionary budget proposal that will more smartly target the way we spend our limited resources.

Success on any of these fronts will take a tremendous amount of political energy -- and will do tremendous good for our state. We need our governor and our legislators to come together and to succeed on all these fronts.

It will not be easy. Powerful political constituencies and, perhaps just as importantly, the powerful force of inertia must be pushed aside. But there is no choice. The easy solutions will no longer work. If legislators decide to obey the constitution next year and pay their past-due bills, it will cost from $350 million to as much as $500 million more to keep the government running at its current level than we will have available to pay for it. That's out of a budget that has already been whittled from $6 billion to $5.3 billion in three years.

Close observers of the process the governor is undertaking say that if you made all the mundane changes being considered by his efficiency panel and more controversial measures such as merging overlapping agencies and if on top of that you threw in such radical measures as shutting down the Clemson Extension Service and taking museums private, at best you might save $200 million.

Let's be clear here: Saving $200 million is nothing to sneeze at. And it's something that should be pursued. But that still falls far short of $500 million. And so some very difficult decisions about the role of government and the structure of our tax system and, yes, probably even the rate of our taxes are going to have to be made. Using what happened this week in Alabama as an excuse to throw up our hands in despair is not logical. And it must not be an option.