ALL THAT HURRYING, for nothing.

One who knows a lot more than I about such things said he had never seen budget conferees get done so fast -- one all-nighter, from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m.

The idea was to get done with the budget fast enough to get it to the governor in time to consider vetoes by Thursday -- thereby avoiding the sine die mini-session that lawmakers usually hold a couple of weeks after the regular session to tie up loose ends.

Like Lady Macbeth fretting over her spot, they were downright fidgety about getting this mess off their hands. But the Senate being the Senate, it spoiled the plan, saying "Hey, wait a minute" over a number of minor provisions. Thus conferees will have to go back to work on Monday.

And a good thing, too. If ever a budget needed further deliberation, this one does.

I've noticed a trend. Whenever state lawmakers, particularly in the House, want to do something that is a bad idea to start with, they do it in a big hurry. They were in such a sweat in 1995 to pass the ill-considered tax swap -- the one that committed the state to pay a huge portion of our local property taxes for us -- that they just couldn't pause to listen to objections. The result has been a financial albatross for the state. Meanwhile, the property tax relief has largely disappeared as local governments raised millage to deal with shrinking state contributions in other areas.

This year, the House moved with all the quiet dignity of a scalded dog to dump the idea of a cigarette tax increase. The leadership didn't want the members to be subjected to another weekend of constituents clamoring for them to do the right thing.

And now this. After several months of bobbing, weaving and ducking the responsibility to fund adequately the most basic functions of state government -- schools, public safety, prisons, health care for the poor -- they rushed to reconcile minor differences between two grossly inadequate budget plans.

But they failed. Which is, as I said, just as well.

Now, at least, there exists the possibility -- not the likelihood, but the possibility -- of doing something better.

And by "better" I mean, for instance, something close to the 1978 level of spending on schools. When adjusted for inflation, both budgets fall far short of that standard. In 2003 dollars, the $791 spent per pupil in 1978-79 comes out to about $500 more than the $1,701 the conferees propose to devote to each child.

"Better" means a lot of other things, too -- such as ending the pecuniary strangulation of our prisons and mental patients. As bad as the situation is with schools, it's worse in other vital services. As House Speaker David Wilkins told me Thursday, the proportion of the budget spent on education is the highest it's been in several years. But that's just because the cuts everywhere else have been far deeper.

(And, as we have said over and over on this page, the problem isn't the cutting -- it's the fact that the cutting is so indiscriminate. Instead of eliminating frills and unnecessary programs, they slash the good with the bad.)

It's not realistic to expect conferees to do better this time -- after all, the Senate got stuck on minor things, not the fundamentals, so they have little motivation to engage in heavy lifting. And conferees generally have to play the cards they're dealt.

But they have to do better. The stakes for our state -- already behind on so many measurements of social and economic well-being -- are too great to sit back and accept this failure.

When you ask lawmakers why things have come to this pass, they'll talk about the irreconcilable clash between differing "philosophies" about government. In other words, some people would rather set our schools back a quarter century than raise taxes because they believe in "small government." I don't buy that.

I had a boss once at another newspaper who was a real jerk, but he taught me something. One night, we caught a serious error in the paper after the presses started rolling. We acted quickly, and I reported with some pride that we had fixed the problem after only 5,000 papers had gone. He was unimpressed. "That's 5,000 real papers going out to 5,000 real readers," he said.

The state budget isn't about philosophy. It isn't about abstractions. It's about real people. You'd be hard pressed to find a member of our Legislature, regardless of party label, who would say he or she wants our streets or our prisons to be unsafe, or for our children to get a worse education than other parts of the country, or for South Carolinians to continue to make 80 cents for every dollar that other Americans are paid.

But under both versions of the budget that conferees will try again to reconcile on Monday, our streets and prisons will be less safe, our children will be crammed into bigger classes and taught by fewer teachers, and our chances for a more prosperous future will be diminished.

All of that will be true, unless conferees come up with a miracle, and somehow get two-thirds of both bodies to go along.

Here's hoping they don't rush this time. Even though this is the last week, rushing seldom produces anything good.