The recent trial balloon for a tax on limited liability companies, partnerships, and other businesses not structured as corporations was punctured and thoroughly deflated. So the geniuses in Albany have now resorted to another tactic in what appears to be a desperate struggle to increase the tax burden here in New York, a state whose residents already bear one of the highest state and local tax burdens in the entire country. Now they want to increase the sales tax.

The specific proposal being backed by leaders of both the Republican-controlled Senate and the Democrat-controlled Assembly, our correspondent at Albany reports at Page One today, is an increase in the sales tax of one-eighth of a percentage point. The increase would apply only in the counties that are served by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which include the five boroughs of New York City. The current tax that residents of New York City pay on everything from clothing to books to gasoline to restaurant meals is 8.625%. It used to be 8.25%, but city and state lawmakers imposed a “temporary” increase that went into effect June 1, 2003, and was set to expire on June 1, 2005. Now the geniuses in Albany want to cancel the expiration and extend at least a portion of the 2003 tax increase that they had promised would sunset.

Now, an eighth of a percentage point may not seem like much to get up in arms about, but it reflects a broader set of failings on the part of the state government in New York and on the part of those running the MTA. For the taxpayers are being asked to shovel more dollars into the maw of the MTA at a time when the agency has already raised fares and has suffered a series of humiliating service breakdowns. And at a time when corruption and cost overruns in the construction of the agency’s new headquarters in Lower Manhattan are making headlines.

What’s more, there’s a sense that the MTA’s priorities are mixed up. It’s spending hundreds of millions to expand the South Ferry station. It plans to spend billions more to build a new Second Avenue line and to extend the no.7 train to the far West Side of Manhattan. It strikes us that before New York’s already hard-pressed taxpayers are asked to pony up for these projects, the MTA’s leaders should focus on getting the existing trains to run reliably, rain or shine. New Yorkers might actually be willing to accept a tax increase if they believed that the money would go toward reliable service instead of palatial headquarters for transit bureaucrats and fantastically expensive government-spending schemes aimed at benefiting football team proprietors. It’s all enough to make us long for the days when the railroads were run by private proprietors.

The high sales tax rate is just one more factor that works to make New York stores less competitive with those of neighboring states and with Internet sites when it comes to competing for shopping dollars. New Jersey and Connecticut have sales tax rates of 6% each. It’s no wonder so many New Yorkers head for malls outside the city on the weekends.

The developments in Albany are taking place as the lawmakers rush to get a budget done by the April 1 deadline for the first time in 20 years. If they keep it up in this style, the voters may just decide that they’d prefer the usual legislative gridlock. At a minimum, this would be a fine aspect of the budget bill for Governor Pataki to veto.