ON THE first day of this year’s legislative session, House Ways and Means Chairman Bobby Harrell told reporters that Gov. Mark Sanford’s income tax bill was so important that he was pushing consideration of it ahead of the budget bill, so it wouldn’t get bogged down behind that time-consuming matter.

That doesn’t sound like such a major concession to most people; the House doesn’t take up the budget until March, a good two months away.

But it was a big deal, because Ways and Means gets started on the budget even before the Legislature convenes; one budget-writing subcommittee met on the first day of the session, another was taking testimony on the second day, and by the second week of the session five were hearing budget requests from state agencies. The pace doesn’t let up until the massive budget document has to be pried from the full committee’s fingers in early March in order to get compiled and printed in time for mid-March debate. Then in mid-May, Mr. Harrell and two other members of the committee, along with much of the committee’s staff, have to plunge into budget negotiations with the Senate, which generally last through the end of the session.

That leaves about a month and a half in the middle of each legislative session for the committee charged with examining tax policy to dig into that subject. That means that pretty much all that gets considered are straightforward bills that deal with discrete tax changes (creating yet another tax loophole, for example), or else measures that the House majority has decided in advance to push through, even if there’s no time to consider all their complexities.

And that means the comprehensive overhaul of the tax structure that our state so desperately needs always gets put off to “next year.”

Rep. Kenny Bingham is tired of waiting for next year to come, and he has made a very smart proposal for transforming it into “this year”: Divide the two jobs of the Ways and Means Committee between two committees. A new Appropriations Committee would write the budget and review bills that involve spending money, and Ways and Means would handle changes in the state’s tax laws.

That frees up the Appropriations Committee to delve more deeply into how state agencies operate, so it can make better proposals about how to spend money, and it allows the Ways and Means Committee to do a better job of thinking through the implications of individual tax proposals and to actually consider more sweeping tax-law changes.

This would have seemed a strange idea a few years ago, when the Legislature routinely made most tax changes through the budget bill. And the two still are closely related: You can only spend as much money as you collect in taxes, and how much money you collect in taxes should be related to how much you need. But now that the House and Senate have all but outlawed raising or lowering taxes in the budget bill, there is no longer as much reason to tie the question of how and where to raise money together with the question of how and where to spend it. And, Mr. Bingham notes, there are plenty of reasons to separate them.

The prospect of finally dealing seriously with tax reform might be the most promising part of his proposal (although having a panel that could spend more time examining state spending is nothing to sneeze at), and it is Mr. Bingham’s primary goal. A Lexington Republican starting his third term in the House, Mr. Bingham was one of the heavy lifters in the Quinn-Sheheen tax overhaul bill that never saw the light of day last year; he has taken on one of the lead roles in trying to revive that plan now that Vincent Sheheen has moved to the Senate and Rick Quinn has been involuntarily retired from public life by the voters.

Comprehensive tax reform isn’t the most exciting topic for most House members, but that doesn’t mean the rules change is doomed. Mr. Bingham’s trump card is the 25 new power positions his plan would create.

“Right now you’ve got Judiciary, and you’ve got Ways and Means — those are the power committees; we all know it,” he says. “Now everybody’s plowing ahead to be on one of those committees. But once you get there (on Ways and Means), the workload is incredible, and then you have other committees that don’t have nearly the workload.”

And it’s getting worse, as House Speaker David Wilkins sends more and more bills to Ways and Means that used to go to the Judiciary Committee and elsewhere. The result is that the work of the entire House increasingly revolves around the budget-writing schedule, which might aid centralized control but certainly isn’t the most productive way to do things.

Mr. Bingham’s bill would leave it to the speaker to make committee assignments, as he does now. In order to keep the other panels full, it would allow 25 representatives to serve on two lesser committee, instead of one. Mr. Bingham believes this would encourage House members to branch out a bit, rather than being stuck in what can be single-issue roles on some committees.

There would be logistical matters to work out — where to house the new committee, how to staff it. But the biggest problem likely would be convincing current Ways and Means Committee members to cut their scope or responsibility in half. It’s worth the effort, if the payoff is a more thorough examination of spending policy as well as tax policy.

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