OUR PENNY-PINCHING governor’s latest attempts to make government spend money the way he does holds some important lessons as the state heads into its fourth consecutive year of budget cuts.

It’s important to learn from those lessons and build upon them, but also to understand their limitations.

While the idea of government employees doubling up on hotel rooms as Gov. Mark Sanford and Commerce Secretary Bob Faith did during their recent economic development trip is probably extreme in most circumstances, it certainly makes sense to adopt the federal government’s per diem rates, which set a city-by-city cap on the amount of money that can be spent on hotel rooms. The governor’s office found that some agencies are spending more than double that limit. And it makes sense to carefully examine the need for travel.

More than that, it makes sense to work toward Mr. Sanford’s goal of changing “the default setting that currently exists in state government that essentially says ‘if it’s not my money, I don’t have to worry about it.’”

Most state employees try to do the best job they can for the public, but some people do have the attitude the governor describes — and that is reinforced by the legislative mindset that says it’s not worth the bother of making a targeted spending cut unless doing it will yield hundreds of millions of dollars.

The governor’s other move also challenges that mindset, but takes it further. His announcement that he had convinced state agencies to come up with a plan to sell off some state aircraft — raising one-time cash and cutting upkeep costs — is important from a governmental as well as a budgetary standpoint.

As Mr. Sanford explained it, his request that agencies find ways to save money on the state’s air fleet resulted in a plan that shifted some of SLED’s work to the Department of Natural Resources and vice versa, while reducing their total fleet from eight to six aircraft. He’d like to see the state’s research universities follow suit, which sounds reasonable to us.

Mr. Sanford correctly called this package “a perfect example of what happens when you get the right hand and the left hand in government working together — inevitably you find there are dollars to be saved and efficiencies to be realized.” While saving money isn’t the main reason to put the governor in charge of most state agencies (political accountability is), it’s an added benefit. As long as state agencies operate as independent fiefdoms, there’s little incentive for them to look for ways to work together to save money, or even provide better service; and they will continue to operate as independent fiefdoms as long as that’s what they are.

But Mr. Sanford is focusing primarily on saving money, and in that regard there’s an important caveat. It is vital to find ways to cut a few hundred thousand dollars here, a couple of million dollars there, because those savings do add up, and we should never operate inefficiently or otherwise waste money, especially not when times are tight. But the fact is that there aren’t enough of those cuts to get the budget back in order.

To do that, our governor and our Legislature are going to have to eliminate huge swaths of what the government does, raise taxes, or do both. They simply cannot continue to shave a little off the top of every agency; doing so leaves some agencies with more money than we can justify spending on them, and leaves others unable to perform vital public services. Neither situation is acceptable.