Months of work by hundreds of people went into the budget that Gov. Jeb Bush proposed last week, but, as he knows well, that's only the beginning. Next comes the give-and-take with the Legislature and the public. This budget, in particular, needs a lot of give and a lot of take.

With revenue growth winding down and the economy beginning to look doubtful, Bush is prudent in calling for more money to put into the rainy-day reserves. He continues to show a creative interest in social services, proposing much-needed increases in mental health, elder care and child welfare. There is full funding for Everglades restoration and the Florida Forever conservation program. These obviously are far-sighted recommendations.

But they contrast with an almost startling indifference toward education. At day's end, one per-student table shows marginally less spending in the public schools, while another shows an insignificant increase. (Some forecasters say that the enrollment estimate on which both are based was 17,000 students -- and $80-million -- too low.) Either way, it means that if school boards award salary increases, as the governor suggests, nothing is left for smaller classes. Florida will solve its worsening teacher shortage not with one-shot bonuses but by providing teachers with professional salaries and working conditions that are conducive to good teaching and effective learning. Anything less is false economy.

The universities, meanwhile, would get nothing but permission to charge their students up to 5 percent higher tuition. With the Board of Regents on death row and Chancellor Adam Herbert quitting in scarcely concealed disgust, the universities are as effectively orphaned as Oliver Twist. True, they did well in Bush's first two budgets, but that's no reason to stop. This, too, is false economy. Florida covets a world-class, high-tech economy for which the governor concedes it needs better roads. But it needs better education even more, as the business community itself has been trying to tell him.

The overall education budget is down almost precisely as much -- $114-million -- as corrections is up. That is a sad commentary on Florida's self-defeating priorities.

Bush could have been kinder to education if he weren't committed to that most foolish of consistencies: cutting taxes for the sake of cutting them. He's proposing another whack at the intangibles tax for an annualized loss of $277.3-million a year. For those who no longer will have to pay it, the individual savings will be relatively small change. For the schools, which need it more, the potential loss is huge.

Granted, it's far from a perfect tax. It applies to some investments but not others, many people brazenly evade it, and it taxes value without regard to whether an asset is producing revenue. Florida is the only state, Bush complains, that "significantly taxes personal investment" this way. But it is also one of the few that doesn't tax personal income, which makes it impossible for Florida to spread the tax burden fairly. Citizens for Tax Justice, a public interest group, calculated that in 1995 the poorest fifth of Florida's people paid 14 percent of their income in state or local taxes, twice as much as the middle fifth and nearly four times as much as the wealthiest, those most likely to own securities subject to the intangibles tax.

There is nothing inherently wrong with a tax on value. That's how everyone's home is taxed, and places of business. But at the state level, Florida taxes value only through the intangibles tax. Bush's budget boasts that the proposed cut will reduce Florida's state tax burden to an average of 5.95 percent of personal wealth, lower than 10 years ago. What the chart doesn't say is how much lower the burden will be for people who can afford to accumulate stocks and bonds, and how much higher it will remain for those who can't.

This is another false economy in that it forces the governor to scrounge budget savings in ways that are ultimately counterproductive or in ways so unpolitic as to encourage the Legislature to cut unwisely somewhere else.

In Juvenile Justice, the budget proposes to "save" $63-million at the expense of county taxpayers by requiring them to pay for pretrial detention, which has been a state responsibility for years. If legislators aren't worried how to explain that back home, they should be.

In Corrections, the budget erases the entire $4.1-million spent this year to supervise people under pretrial intervention, which spares the public the cost of a trial and the offender the stigma of a record. State attorneys could continue the program, but if they wanted the offenders to be supervised -- as they should be -- they'd have to find some local agency to pay for it. The likely results: more work for the courts, more money and lives wasted on incarceration.

There is also no money set aside for the likelihood that the Supreme Court will certify a need for even more trial judges than the 43 it vainly sought last year, or for looking ahead to the 2004 constitutional deadline for full state funding of the courts, on which the chief justice puts a price tag of at least $400-million.

Staying a course, Bush proposes to privatize or "outsource" hundreds more state jobs, including not just such likely ones as food service and maintenance but also such core functions as personnel and payroll. The Legislature should be terribly cautious about the hidden costs in this. "Outsourced" state workers are less likely to have health insurance. As the governor concedes, that has pricey implications for health care providers and subsidized insurance programs such as Healthy Kids. He agrees that a bidder's willingness to offer health insurance to its workers should be a factor when the state evaluates bids, but that's not enough; it should be mandatory.

The budget is balanced, as the law requires, but only superficially. Too many necessities suffer in that balance. The Legislature can and should do better.

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