RALEIGH – If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is too good to be true.

This good advice doesn’t just apply to business, relationships, and the efficacy of home remedies sold over the Internet. It also applies to politics.

When politicians promise that give you all sorts of valuable goodies, while making someone else pay for all those valuable goodies, disbelieve them. Especially disbelieve them if they try to claim that North Carolinians won’t have to pay for the goodies because the “federal government” will.

The federal government has no money that it does not first tax from us, either directly through tax levies or by inflating the money supply. “Federal dollars” are nothing more than dollars taxed from households in North Carolina and other states, sent to Washington, and then returned to their places of origin with shipping and handling charges deducted for the “favor.”

When Gov. Beverly Perdue and the Democratic leaders of the General Assembly took credit for plugging billions of dollars in state budget deficits with “federal dollars,” what they were really celebrating was their clever evasion of the North Carolina constitution.

Our state constitution requires that our state budget be balanced every year. It forbids the use of borrowed money to pay for the operating expenses of the government. Because the federal constitution has no such provision, the federal government has run budget deficits in most of the past 70 years. Recently, the deficits have exceeded $1 trillion a year.

In effect, all of the federal money used to plug North Carolina’ budget hole was borrowed. That’s unwise and, at best, extra-constitutional. But the story gets even worse, I’m sorry to say.

By using borrowed money to sustain levels of state spending that current state taxes can’t sustain, Perdue and legislative leaders have set the stage for future tax increases. By protecting billions of dollars in waste, fraud, and ineffective programs, they strengthened the special-interest constituency that benefits from these programs.

Those lobbies will be back in 2011 and beyond to protect their programs from cuts. History suggests that, more often than not, these spending lobbies will succeed.

A new study from economists Russell Sobel and George Crowley demonstrates the effects in clear statistical terms. After examining several decades of federal and state fiscal trends and modeling how federal subsidies influence state decisions, the economists concluded that for every $1 of federal aid to states, future state taxes rise by between 33 and 42 cents.

Here is how Sobel and Crowley explain the effect:

[S]pending programs create their own new political constituency, in that the government employees and private recipients whose incomes depend on the program, and their families, will use political pressure to fight against any discontinuation of the program…With more government funds comes additional fights over political resource allocations, and an expansion in the rent-seeking industry occurs…[F]ederal grants may result in an expansion in state lobbying activity that is successful in gaining influence over future state spending.

It’s pointless to fixate on how government might work in theory. What matters is how it works in practice. Some argue that, in theory, Washington can help smooth out the effects of economic cycles by borrowing to support government expenditures during recessions and then paying off the debts and reducing the expenditures during economic booms.

It’s not at all clear that government ought to protect public-sector expenditures at taxpayers’ expense during recessions. But even if the policy was clearly justified, it relies on an unrealistic assumption – that after the recession is over, politicians will adjust government debts and budgets accordingly.

In reality, government programs persist as long as their political constituencies retain power. By using “federal funds” to avoid making necessary budget adjustments in 2009 and 2010, Perdue and the General Assembly have only made it harder to carry out those adjustments in 2011.

That’s precisely what public-sector unions, vendors, activist groups, and other spending lobbies wanted. They are big fans of federal bailouts.

That’s a good reason why the rest of us shouldn’t be.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.