RALEIGH – Much of North Carolina’s longstanding political establishment – the officeholders, bureaucrats, activists, pundits, lobbyists, and trade associations who dominated politics in Raleigh until the 2010 election cycle – is bound and determined to deny that the state sales tax is a burden to anyone.

Given that many of these same leaders of the political class have complained for years about the regressivity of North Carolina’s tax system – a state of affairs attributable almost entirely to the state’s increasing reliance on sales and excise taxes to pay for government services – their current cause may seem puzzling.

But as I pointed out last week, when it comes right down to it liberals care more about preserving and expanding government than about ending regressive taxation. If they can accomplish both, they’ll do it. If not, they’ll side with government workers over taxpayers.

In order to justify higher taxes to protect government jobs, however, they have to discount the significance of the sales tax. It’s just a few cents on the dollars, they say, and the disputed amount is less than a penny. What harm could it possibly do?

Because the statewide sales tax rate is 5.75 percent, rounding it up to the nearest integer allows for a slight revision of a familiar nursery rhyme:

Sing a song of sixpence,
A tax on what you buy,
You will never taste it
Baked in a pie.

You won’t see or feel it
Though you’ll still pay the freight.
Is that not a useful tool
For bankrolling the state?

In 2009, Gov. Beverly Perdue and the then-Democratic General Assembly raised sales and income taxes to cover budget deficits. These “temporary” taxes were supposed to expire in 2011. Both Perdue and the Republican legislature agree that the temporary income taxes should go away. But they disagree about the sales tax. Perdue wants to keep three-quarters of the tax hike, or just over $800 million, in place for another two years. The Republican House just voted to let the tax expire as scheduled.

That’s not the only difference between the two budget plans. The House also included a reserve for additional income-tax cuts, reportedly to include both personal and corporate relief. But by far the biggest difference between the two plans is their treatment of the sales tax.

Several years ago, the John Locke Foundation commissioned economists at the Beacon Hill Institute, based at Suffolk University in Boston, to construct an econometric model for estimating changes in taxes and other public policies on private investment, employment, and income in North Carolina. As the outlines of this year’s budget dispute became clearer, we asked the Beacon Hill scholars to run some estimates.

We released their findings yesterday. Here are some key points:

• Tax policies associated with the House budget plan will create about 14,000 15,000 private-sector jobs in 2012. Subtract the 7,000 public-sector layoffs likely to result from the budget, and the Republican plan is a net job creator.*

• The tax policies associated with the Perdue budget plan will create about 3,000 4,400 private-sector jobs next year, which is about the same number as only a bit more than the public-sector layoffs in her plan. The Perdue plan is not much of a net job creator.*

This makes the second study to project thousands of jobs if the 2009 tax hikes are allowed to expire and business taxes cut. A study released in April from three UNC-Chapel Hill researchers put the jobs created by the House revenue package at 16,000 in 2012 and 19,000 by 2013.

If your goal is to boost North Carolina’s economy, there is really no question as to which plan you should pick. But if your goal is to protect the jobs of government workers at the expense of private workers and taxpayers, the Perdue plan is for you.

By the way, it turns out that the nursery rhyme “Sing a Song of Sixpence” may have begun life as a recruitment pitch for Blackbeard’s pirate ship.

Appropriate.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.

* The BHI/JLF analysis I cite here originally left out a piece of the tax package included in both the Perdue and House plans — the expiration of income-tax surcharges first imposed in 2009. The study has since been updated, thus yielding higher job-creation and economic-impact figures than I originally reported for both plans. My argument didn’t change, only the magnitude of the respective effects.