IT'S EASY TO BUY THE notion that the only options facing lawmakers trying to balance the budget are higher taxes or indiscriminate cuts that cripple essential agencies while funding optional programs.

But there are several things legislators could do to cut spending and still provide services that the state must provide. The key is examining some long-held beliefs about how we do government. We might ask:

• Should we spend $155 million a year ($15,000 per person) to lock up 10,000 people who have never committed a violent crime? Or would we be better off using heavy fines, community service requirements and electronic monitoring to punish bad-check writers and petty drug users and the like? (Looked at another way: If we have a limited amount of money to spend on prisons, should we put those nonviolent offenders behind bars? Or should we make sure we provide drug-treatment and educational programs to the 13,000 violent offenders who will eventually be released back into the community -- and hire enough correctional officers to keep them from killing themselves, their guards and average citizens?)

• Should we lock up 400 truants and other status offenders every year, at a cost of $5,000 for the average 45 days (the annualized equivalent of $40,000 each)?

• Should our state government be responsible for more highways than all but three other states, or should we do what other states have done and deed two-thirds of the roads over to local governments to maintain, and then empower them to fund that maintenance?

• Does it make sense to spend tax money on individuals and entire agencies (the Sentencing Guidelines Commission and Commission on Women, among others) whose main purpose is to lobby the Legislature?

• Should we subsidize duplication and inefficiency in the administration of our public schools by supporting 85 separate school districts, each with its own superintendent and school board and administrative office?

• Does the state need to run 33 separate institutions of higher learning, with overlapping degree programs and, in one case, adjacent campuses?

• Is it reasonable to divide the executive branch of government into more than 70 separate agencies, each with its own director and many with their own legal department and accounting department and human resources office and so on?

Making changes along these lines would be politically difficult and require serious follow-through. Changing our ideas of who should go to prison is politically daunting in such a law-and-order state. Few things are more likely to get parents and community leaders riled up than talk of merging school districts. And whether it's merging school districts or state agencies, saving money takes a lot more than simply lumping a half-dozen bodies into one, making the director of each of the old agencies a deputy director of the new agency, and having everyone else in the hierarchy do their current jobs but move down a level. It might take additional legislative intervention -- some would say meddling -- to make sure things aren't done that way.

It's a lot easier to pick numbers that add up, slash everybody's budget, and leave it to the agencies to figure out what to cut. But that's not what our legislators were elected to do. They were elected to make the wisest use of the resources we have entrusted to them. That means tackling the really difficult choices.