North Carolina’s business taxes are remarkably low - 47th in the country, according to a research outfit that studies taxation for hundreds of large, multi-state corporations.

And North Carolina’s business climate is the best in the country - and for the third year in a row, according to Site Selection magazine.

So whatever might be wrong with North Carolina’s economy, it isn’t taxes or regulations. They remain among the least burdensome in the United States.

Yet to hear some politicians and business people tell it, the state’s corporate income tax is driving away business. They are determined to lower it in this election-year session of the General Assembly.

Their argument rests on a single statistic: that at 6.9 percent, North Carolina’s corporate income tax is higher than our neighbors’ and third-highest in the Southeast.

Here’s what they don’t say: that if you count all state and local taxes on business, which is what really matters, North Carolina ranks 47th.

That calculation wasn’t done by some tax-loving liberal outfit with creative statisticians, but by an organization that advises state chambers of commerce and is supported by what it calls “550 major corporations engaged in interstate and international business.”

The statistical work for this Council on State Taxation was done by Ernst & Young. It analyzed state and local taxes on business in several ways, and North Carolina came out near the very bottom in all of them.

The study noted that, “although the corporate income tax has been the focus of intense legislative debate in a number of state legislatures during the last two years, it represents a relatively small share of total state and local business taxes. . It is the combined burden of all the state and local business taxes that should be the focus of business tax reform debates.”

In other words, our total tax burden on business already is so low that we don’t need to cut the corporate income tax to attract jobs. And as Site Selection points out, “North Carolina still has the lowest rate of unionization of workers in the entire country.”

But many politicians, including state Sen. Patrick Ballantine, alas, seem determined to make us look bad, whatever the facts. Running for the Republican nomination for governor, Sen. Ballantine recently said it’s hard to attract industry “when our tax rate is so high.”

Forty-seventh in the country is high?

The real danger for North Carolina’s economy is not that we tax business too much. The real danger is that we spend too little for education, infrastructure, environmental quality and other public assets that high-quality corporations want for themselves and their employees.

Paid for by the Mike Easley Committee