N.C. House and Senate Democrats have haggled for weeks about their preferred methods of increasing taxes on North Carolinians. John Locke Foundation experts have responded to their various ideas. The Wilson Daily Times recently asked Joseph Coletti to explain the “tax on taxes,” a proposed personal income tax surcharge budget negotiators have been considering. (The 2 percent adjustment could also be made when filing income taxes and could be included in tax tables, said Joe Coletti, a fiscal policy analyst with the John Locke Foundation, a free market and limited government think tank in Raleigh. “It’s a tax on the tax,” Coletti said. “It’s an additional tax. Whatever your tax liability is will raise 2 percent.”) Meanwhile, an editorial in the Alamance News used JLF research to explain that the state’s budget problems stem from overspending, not undertaxing. (A 2006 John Locke Foundation study found N.C. legislators typically expand state programs in good years beyond what can be sustained when lean budget years come. Democrats who control both houses of the North Carolina General Assembly apparently think North Carolinians don’t pay enough to the state in taxes.) State Senate Republicans also highlighted this week a John Hood Daily Journal discussing Gov. Beverly Perdue’s response to the budget debate.