ANYONE WHO still considers Mark Sanford an ineffective governor after the General Assembly voted last week to give a major tax cut to small businesses doesn’t understand the game being played.

Critics are focusing on the fact that this wasn’t the budget-busting $1-billion-a-year income tax cut that Mr. Sanford wanted. (And even that was less than what he had campaigned for office on — eliminating the personal income tax entirely.)

But it is a tax cut that will reduce the amount of money available to fund government programs by more than $100 million a year once it’s phased in four years from now.

It is a tax cut that was approved at a time when the state is still scrimping on basic services such as guarding our prisons and keeping our highways safe.

And it is a tax cut that was passed by a nearly unanimous Legislature and praised — yes, praised — by leading Democratic legislators and the state Democratic Party.

There’s nothing extraordinary about House Republicans salivating over a tax cut; that’s what they’ve done since coming to power in 1994. And there would have been nothing extraordinary about Republicans and Democrats joining together to approve a $100 million tax cut in the 1990s, before the bottom fell out of the economy.

But it’s quite extraordinary for Democrats and Senate Republicans to join in a tax-cutting frenzy at the same time they are cutting some essential state agencies’ budgets for the sixth consecutive year — and still failing to adequately fund programs to care for the mentally ill and the developmentally disabled, and coming up short on the services they had promised to help poorly performing schools improve.

What last week’s vote demonstrates is the most powerful thing about Mr. Sanford: his ability to completely change the debate.

In this case, he changed the debate from how to pay for essential services that have been crippled by repeated budget cuts to how to lower what he claims are astoundingly high taxes. And he moved the starting point for the debate from the status quo to a $1 billion-a-year tax cut. In that context, a $100 million tax cut seems reasonable, even modest.

But that cut is only modest in a state with high taxes. And South Carolina is not such a state. That fact was underlined just a day before the tax cut cleared its final hurdle, when the anti-tax Tax Foundation released its annual ranking of the states’ tax burdens.

As always, South Carolina was on the low end of the scale: South Carolinians spend an average of 36 days a year working to pay state and local taxes, which ranks us 33rd in the nation. (When federal taxes also are considered, our “Tax Freedom Day” comes 99 days into the year, ranking us 39th.) We spend an average of 9.7 percent of our income paying state and local taxes (the national average is 10.1 percent), and our average per capita state and local tax bill is $2,976, about $800 below the national average.

But none of that matters to the public when the governor has spent two years pounding home the demonstrably inaccurate message that our taxes are among the highest in the nation. And it doesn’t matter to legislators when the Washington anti-tax groups that fawn at Mr. Sanford’s feet have spent that time flexing their substantial financial muscles in thinly veiled threats against any legislators who dare to disagree.

The governor’s show of force wouldn’t be such a big deal if the income tax debate were an isolated case. It’s not.

Many lawmakers are warming to some sort of compromise on his other crusade to defund the government, and at the same time undermine the concept of public education. In the context of a proposal to suck $200 million a year out of state coffers in order to pay middle- and upper-income parents to take their kids out of the public schools and to let businesses self-select how their tax money is spent, a plan to give limited tax selection to businesses and test the so-called choice program in two school districts might sound reasonable, even modest. That’s especially true if you’re a legislator who saw the invasion of the national anti-tax groups in last year’s legislative elections.

Even legislators who know our taxes are low and our obligations unmet went along with the business tax cut, hoping that throwing a bone to Mr. Sanford and his allies would make them go away.

It won’t.

Right after the Senate voted to cut income taxes for small businesses by nearly a third, yet another of the Washington groupies weighed in. The National Taxpayers Union sent a letter to The State excoriating “Democrats and weak-kneed Republicans in the Senate” who “stand in the way of important tax relief and recently rejected Sanford’s plan for broad-based income tax cuts.”

The message to lawmakers who don’t toe the line was clear: Compromise is the same as resistance. And given our patient persistence and our bottomless pockets, resistance is futile.

Ms. Scoppe can be reached at cscoppe@thestate.com or at (803) 771-8571.