GOV. MARK SANFORD is convinced that our taxes are too high, our schools are hopeless and our government is too big, and these beliefs form the basis of much of his legislative agenda.

But key numbers he uses to convince others of this don’t mean what he says they mean.

He says our top income tax rate is “effectively” the highest in the Southeast and the fifth-highest in the nation. That’s true of our actual tax rate. But our effective rate — the one real people pay after they factor in exemptions, credits and deductions — is among the lowest in the Southeast and between the middle and the bottom nationally, depending on how it is calculated.

He cherry-picks numbers to show that our schools are not improving, and ignores countless other numbers that show our schools are making tremendous — sometimes nation-leading — progress.

And now we learn that his claim that “South Carolinians spend 130 percent of the national average on the cost of government” simply is not true.

What this number actually shows is what portion of our state’s economy comes from the government, as opposed to manufacturing and other sectors. And in a poor state like South Carolina, there’s a reason that number is high: Just as poor people must spend some minimum amount of money on food, poor states must spend some minimum amount on schools and prisons and highways, even if there’s not much money in the economy.

The fact that we have a small private sector does not mean that we spend more on government than other states. The fact is that on nearly every legitimate measure of taxes and spending, South Carolina comes out at the national average, or well below it.

It would be legitimate for Mr. Sanford to use his number to argue that government needs to make up a smaller portion of our economy. But the way you achieve that is by doing what he correctly says must be a priority for our state — growing the private sector. And the way you do that is by providing a well-educated workforce and a safe place to raise a family.

We are nowhere near being able to do that.

Not when we lead the nation in traffic deaths because drivers speed down crumbling highways at frightening speeds, confident that our meager cadre of troopers has no time to notice.

Not when dangerously mentally ill patients are being handcuffed to a fence outside a mental hospital, or left on the streets to injure or kill themselves or others, because there’s no money to treat them.

Not when our prisons are tinderboxes because we lock up more people than most states and nations and hire only two-thirds as many guards as other states.

Not when our poorest schools have to cancel the summer school and after-school programs that the Legislature identified as crucial to improving performance because the state has slashed their funding.

Not when we pay inflated insurance rates because we can’t afford investigators to fight insurance fraud and poor people go to hospital emergency rooms because we can’t afford to provide medical coverage.

These are real crises that are harming real people in our state, and making it impossible for our state to move forward; they will take real money to solve. Mr. Sanford has proposed funding to address some of these problems; but some isn’t good enough. If, once we address them all, we discover that we have more money than we need, then we can further reduce our taxes.