EVERYBODY talks about comprehensive tax reform but nobody does anything about it.

If anything, most people who say we need to overhaul our disjointed tax system rather than continuing to tweak it add a disturbing “but wait.”

The S.C. Chamber of Commerce says that “approaching tax reform in a piecemeal fashion only exacerbates administrative inefficiencies and taxpayer derision,” that “temporary solutions leave behind negative long-term consequences” — and that the Legislature must quickly approve the chamber’s piecemeal, temporary solution. That would be to finish off the job of emasculating local governments, by adding a spending cap to the tax cap the Legislature just imposed on cities and counties.

Gov. Mark Sanford declared in his State of the State address last week that he has “come to agree with many of you who believe that we should take a comprehensive look at our tax system.” But first, he says, we have to further skew the tax code by reducing the one major tax we would have room to raise if we were to try a raise-some/lower-some reform package.

And I’ve lost count of the legislators who can recite the mantra that tweaking the tax code to satisfy the squeakiest wheel only creates louder squeaks elsewhere — but who voted last year for the property tax bill that satisfied a few loud homeowners at the cost of a dangerously high sales tax that threatens to cut into retail sales in some areas, to name but one of the problems it created.

Then there’s Education Superintendent Jim Rex, who came out very publicly for comprehensive tax reform last week when he told senators that he considered it the essential first step to uncoupling the quality of a child’s education from the wealth of that child’s neighbors.

“I don’t think you can look at funding without looking at how we gather the resources,” he told the special Senate panel that is searching for a way to make school funding equitable.

But first, Dr. Rex said, he has to build a grassroots constituency for reform.

What?

That’s right. Not only is he not asking for his own special little favor before lawmakers tackle the tough job. He’s volunteering to actually do something to make that job possible.

“I understand you’re going to have to have some constituency support out there,” he said, “and I’m going to try to help build it.”

Dr. Rex has been talking for months about his plan to spend two days a week this year traveling the state, preaching the gospel of increasing innovation and choice, reinvigorating the teaching profession, revising the accountability system and creating that fair and equitable funding system.

But it wasn’t until last week that it became clear to me that this was something more than a campaign gimmick or the ivory tower musings of someone who’s spent too long in academia — that he intended to take on the most complex and trickiest public policy challenge in our state.

Legislators actually made more progress than I expected last year on separating property wealth from educational opportunities, but they’ll never sever the link until they replace all local school funding with state funding, and they can’t do that without overhauling the entire state and local tax system. (That is by no means the only reason we need to overhaul the tax system; but it’s a mighty important one.)

And legislators won’t do that without grassroots support because, as Dr. Rex told me later, “all these special interests that are comfortable with the way things are now will cut their legs off.”

The superintendent doesn’t pretend to be a tax expert, although he certainly seems to understand the basics of tax politics. He also understands that “we’re going to have to collect resources to do what we say is important,” and so it’s essential that we “give our policymakers some support for coming up with a more simple way to do that, that we understand is as fair as it can be, and we don’t have that now, and anybody who’s thought about it for 10 minutes knows that.”

He has no illusions about the duty he has signed up for. As he told the Senate equity panel, “What you’re grappling with I think is perhaps the most important thing we need to do as a state, and also the riskiest.”

And he admits he isn’t exactly sure how he was going to get people excited about comprehensive tax reform. But he thinks it starts with educating the public, which he figures he’s in a good position to do.

To that I’d add making people believe that you’re an honest broker, which the only Democrat holding statewide office in South Carolina is working hard to do.

The clearest example of that is the way he talked about revitalizing the teaching profession when he made his first official visit to the Republican-controlled General Assembly last week.

For too long, he said, teachers have been told that they’re the problem. “I don’t believe that,” he said, pausing only briefly before adding: “Don’t get me wrong; we have some people in the profession who don’t need to be in the profession, and we need to get them out.”

Dr. Rex has some good ideas about how to do that, and he made a point last week of reassuring legislators that he will be happy to share those ideas with them this legislative session — in between stops on the Jim Rex Comprehensive Tax Reform Tour ’07.

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