TO NO GREAT surprise, Gov. Mark Sanford generated a firestorm of protest during his latest round of budget hearings when he questioned the need for the state to fund the Palmetto Pride anti-litter program and the Clemson Extension Service’s master gardeners program.

This squeaky-wheel response to criticism has always worked well in our state, where a minority of legislators can stop just about any change from occurring.

But at some point, our state’s leaders are going to have to start governing for the entire state, instead of simply protecting their own pet projects. And the Sanford administration has offered up a simple, and useful, roadmap for making that transition.

Will Folks, speaking on behalf of the governor when the outrage over his boss’s impertinent suggestions began to mount, gave strikingly similar explanations for questioning the two programs.

On Palmetto Pride: “When you look at critical health care and public safety and education needs that exist in South Carolina, the governor simply felt this was an example of a program that we should look at funding more with private dollars as opposed to public dollars,” he told The Greenville News. (It doesn’t help that the program just added a deposed legislators to the payroll, and that the director of this tiny program makes more money than the governor, educations superintendent and directors of most state agencies.)

On the master gardener program: “In light of the health care, public safety and education needs that you see in South Carolina, this is certainly something the governor feels the state shouldn’t do,” Mr. Folks told The Associated Press. (The governor had earlier compared the master gardeners program’s importance to the importance of childhood immunization; it did not come out well in the comparison.)

Statements like that don’t make you popular. They’re jarring. But they’re jarring precisely because they are indisputable. It is simply not possible to disagree with them.

There is no way a rational person can argue that the state has a greater obligation to run a litter clean-up program (even if it were well-managed) than to make sure that every child in our state has a shot at a decent education.

There is no way a rational person can argue that the state has a greater obligation to train people to promote beautification and gardening than to place an adequate number of Highway Patrol troopers on our deadliest-in-the-nation highways.

Setting priorities means making uncomfortable comparisons. That’s why we don’t do it in this polite and genteel state. And that’s why this polite and genteel state is last in the nation on measures where we want to be first and first in the nation on measures where we want to be last.

Supporters of less-important programs are left sputtering that the comparisons aren’t valid. That’s not true; the comparisons are simply not what they’re used to.

They’ll even say critics don’t understand how valuable their pet programs are. But what they won’t say is that their programs are more important than putting a qualified teacher in every classroom or providing enough guards to keep our prisons safe or providing the treatment necessary to keep the dangerously mentally ill off the streets. They can’t argue that; they know it’s not true.

Squeezing inefficiencies out of government — which the General Assembly has thus far refused to do in any serious way — would certainly save some money to be better used on delivering services. But unless and until the General Assembly and the governor agree to raise taxes, there will continue to be an insufficient amount of money available to pay for all the programs our state has committed to. That means that unless we want to do an even less adequate job of addressing our critical needs, we have to stop doing some of the things we’re doing now.

But that’s not all it means.

It also means we can’t start new programs.

Or cut taxes.

There is no way a rational person can argue that the state has a greater obligation to reduce taxes — particularly when South Carolinians pay a smaller percentage of their income in taxes than people in 40 other states — than to deal with “the health care, public safety and education needs” of which Mr. Folks rightly speaks.

If some aspects of our current tax code discourage investment — and I believe several of them do — then we need to change them. Perhaps we need to find a way to lower the tax rate for businesses that are taxed under the individual income tax code rather than the corporate tax code. Or perhaps we simply need to do away with some of the deductions and exemptions and simultaneously lower tax rates, so that the numbers on tax tables more accurately reflect the actual percentage of income that is paid in taxes.

You don’t have to cut taxes overall in order to change the tax code. When you reform the tax code, you raise some taxes and cut others. That is precisely what we need to do, looking not just at the income tax, but also at the property, sales and excise taxes.

What we do not need to do is cut taxes “in light of the health care, public safety and education needs that you see in South Carolina.” That’s every bit as irresponsible as continuing to fund Palmetto Pride and master gardeners and a host of other boutique programs at the expense of essential state services.

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