WE'RE DELIGHTED THAT Senate leaders aren't taking "no" for an answer, now that they've failed to get support for their first proposal to pull our government-- and especially our public schools -- out of crisis.

But the plan they are warming to is not the answer. In fact, it causes far more problems than it could ever hope to solve -- problems that are all too easy to overlook in the glare of the plan's dramatic promises.

While there are ways to avoid it, it is quite possible -- likely, perhaps -- that any solution to our fiscal crisis will entail massive changes to our tax system and will include some provisions we all dislike. That certainly is the case with the proposal by Sen. David Thomas, which the Senate Republican Caucus tentatively endorsed last week: It would raise the sales tax to 7 percent, eliminate all property taxes on houses and automobiles and give the schools an extra $200 million.

Sen. Thomas readily acknowledges that his motivation isn't to give the schools extra money. He threw in that sweetener when he saw an opportunity to pass a massive change to our tax system that his colleagues have refused for years to even consider.

There was good reason they would not consider it before. Among its largest flaws:

• It strips city and county council members of just about any say over how much money they can raise, and therefore spend, to do the job their communities elected them to do. While the plan keeps in place property taxes on manufacturing, commercial and rental property, it caps the tax rates at current levels. There is no justification for that level of micromanaging from the state.

• It locks in our state's biggest education problem: the fact that the quality of education you receive depends primarily upon how wealthy a community you live in. This plan distributes the new sales tax money on exactly the same basis upon which the property tax money is currently distributed. In other words, if your school district now collects 1 percent of all the homeowner and personal property taxes that are paid statewide, it will get 1 percent of the new sales tax money.

• It forces people whose local governments are small or frugal to subsidize local governments that are larger or more wasteful. As with the school equity problem, this flows from the fact that the cities and the counties get the same-sized piece of the sales tax pie as they are getting of the property tax pie.

It's one thing to suggest that education is a statewide responsibility and that those of us who live in Columbia have an obligation to make sure that children who live in Clarendon County have as good an access to it as our children do. It's quite another to suggest that we should make sure the Clarendon County government can provide the same services that the Columbia government provides. Beyond that, once we acknowledge that providing a good education is the responsibility of the entire state, we have to actually do that, and just giving poor districts the same portion of the money they now get isn't going to do the job.

As important as it is to better fund schools, there's a big difference between swallowing a plan with a few objectionable parts and swallowing one composed almost entirely of objectionable parts -- as this one is. Legislators need to go back to the drawing board.