RALEIGH – So after weeks of costly negotiations in Raleigh between House and Senate leaders, the Democratic majority of the General Assembly has finally struck a deal – to jack up sales and income tax rates on North Carolinians by more than $1 billion a year.

What fresh, out-of-the-box thinking. During the 2001-02 recession, then-Gov. Mike Easley and the Democratic legislature raised sales and income taxes, weakening North Carolina’s economic recovery. Now, faced with another recession, Gov. Beverly Perdue and the Democratic legislature are about to, well, raise sales and income taxes, weakening North Carolina’s economic recovery.

What’s next, a re-release of My Big Fat Greek Wedding and the return of Rosie magazine?

We’ve seen all this before, and it didn’t end well. Rather than seeing North Carolina’s budget crisis as the result of too many spending lobbies chasing too few taxpayer dollars, the political class in Raleigh has decided that North Carolinians still have too much money in their pockets. Better to confiscate and spend those dollars on bloated bureaucracies and broken programs rather than let North Carolina households and businesses address their own problems, including excessive debt and job loss.

While political insiders in Raleigh jockeyed for position and scored the legislative winners and losers from the resulting budget “compromise,” the rest of the state increasing viewed the goings-on in the capital with a mixture of amazement and disgust. City and county officials struggled to pass 2009-10 budgets without information from Raleigh on how the state budget would affect their jurisdictions. Business leaders wondered why, in the midst of the deepest recession in decades, legislative leaders were even considering any scheme to raise taxes on business activity and job creation in the state. And taxpayers fumed.

According to a new statewide poll by the Civitas Institute, two-thirds of North Carolina voters oppose the one-cent sales-tax hike the state legislature and Perdue administration are about to inflict on them. A staggering 79 percent of voters say that Perdue and the legislature have not “done all they can to remove wasteful spending from the state budget in order to prevent the need for a tax increase.” And a similarly overwhelming majority doubt that any so-called temporary tax hike will in fact prove to be temporary.

The governor, legislative leaders, and other tax-hike supporters argue that North Carolinians would have a different view of the budget situation if they truly understood the issues involved. No, taxpayers understand the basic issues well enough. That’s why they’re upset.

Taxpayers understand that giving North Carolina a higher-than-average sales tax and one of the highest income taxes in the United States is unlikely to benefit a state economy that already ranks as one of the worst in the country.

Taxpayers understand that after sending billions of extra dollars to Raleigh over the past decade, supposedly to improve public services such as education and transportation, North Carolina’s progress in these areas has ranged from mediocre to nonexistent. They have gotten a bad deal from all this “public investment” and properly resent it.

Taxpayers understand that putting them deeper into debt – both through federal bailouts and state tax hikes – is precisely the wrong thing to do at a time when excessive government, business, and household debt already poses a major threat to our long-term prosperity.

Taxpayers understand that when government is a state’s only major growth industry, that state is headed downward, not upward. Preserving government jobs at the expense of higher taxes, and thus lower job creation in the private sector, is a foolish and ruinous economic policy.

If Democrats in the General Assembly were just going to jack up our sales and income tax rates, again, why spend months pretending otherwise? It would have been simpler and cheaper to go back in the files, pull the records of the 2001-02 legislative session, and just copy everything. If legislator commentary was deemed necessary, it would have been readily available by popping in the appropriate videotape and pushing rewind, then play.

Next time, I guess, it will be different. It’ll be on DVD.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation