North Carolina's "Tax Holiday" is this weekend and you can rest assured that lots of stores will be busy with back-to-school shoppers.  That's all fine and good, but when you juxtapose this event with the other tax news coming out of Raleigh as the legislature tries to balance the state's budget, you begin to wonder what kind of weird logic is being used over there.  To wit, here's the first paragraph from a story at WXII about the weekend:

State leaders said this weekend's sales tax holiday is a needed boost to help North Carolina families shop for back to school during a difficult economic time.

Now here's a paragraph from a Winston-Salem Journal article about the 2009-2010 NC budget that the legislature sent to the governor for approval:

By far the largest part of the tax package is a one-penny increase on the sales tax, bringing the sales tax rate in most counties to 7.75 percent from the current rate of 6.75 percent. That represents a 15 percent jump in what consumers will pay in sales tax.

I'm not going to go on a tax rant here, but I would like to know how giving me a two day holiday on a limited number of items and then raising my year-round tax rate by 15% is helping me?  Believe me, I'd gladly give up my holiday in exchange for a 5% increase or no increase at all.  Sheesh.