The latest from the N.C. Association of Realtors features Angie the Homeowners' Advocate (no, we're not making this up). She visits Raleigh to interview Bob the Barber. The bottom line from interviewer and interviewee: a proposed equity-stealing "home tax" just won't cut it in North Carolina.

"The government is taking money out of your pocket," Bob declares, resolving that he'll make some calls.

Angie, Bob and their kin populate ads that are part of a half-million dollar blitz by the Realtors against proposals to let North Carolina citizens vote, on a county-by-county basis, to impose a transfer tax on local real estate sales. The Realtors, who live by their percentage commissions on sales prices, aren't buying it. Neither are various homebuilder organizations.

What they are buying is a campaign against a transfer tax proposal that has its pluses and minuses, but which at least addresses serious problems that demand a serious discussion.

That's hardly what they're getting in ads that fall back on glib labels like "the N.C. home tax" for a measure that would affect all real estate transactions, residential and commercial. And which gloss over the fact that the money to build schools and provide health care for a fast-growing state has to come from somewhere.

Reportedly, pressure from the Realtors -- whose political action committee gave more money, $600,000, to legislative candidates during last year's elections than any other PAC -- caused state senators to get cold feet last week and walk away from a proposed budget compromise. Thus the transfer tax, and organized opposition it, have become big factors in wrapping up the legislative session. According to one account, senators considered the proposed compromise "behind closed doors for about two hours with lobbyists for the home builders and Realtors camped outside."

Just so there's no misunderstanding: The real estate and homebuilding interests have every right to make their views known, in whatever legal manner they wish, both to legislators and the public. If big consequences for their industries mean big bucks spent on ads opposing a change, so be it. Government is, in part, intended to be a clash of competing interests.

But let the better argument win, not just the biggest checkbook. The issue for the General Assembly is not who can buy the most ads or make the most campaign contributions, but whether a real estate transfer tax is a rational revenue-raiser for North Carolina counties whose citizens opt for it.

In Wake County, for example, the need to build new schools fills the news pages. Besides calls for greater economies in construction and more charter schools, proposed remedies include higher property taxes (Wake's rank relatively low) or sales taxes, and even impact fees on all new development. The revenue-raisers all have their drawbacks, and while economy and innovation are always welcome, they're unlikely to fill the bill in a school system growing by thousands and thousands of students a year.

In that context, and with the future of the schools in the balance, Wake officials and residents might well decide that a transfer tax, which affects only those properties being sold, makes sense. Certainly the revenue -- estimated at more than $100 million a year locally from a 1 percent tax (the figure used in several legislative bills filed earlier this session) -- would do wonders. Weighed against that sum would be the hardship such a tax would work on individual home buyers and sellers (in practice, it would probably be split, depending on market conditions).

In the Realtors' ad, Angie the Advocate isn't mentioning much of that. But in wrapping up a $20 billion budget, legislators will have to take all the factors into consideration. It's their responsibility not to be deafened by the clash of individual interests, but to sense and to uphold North Carolina's public interest.

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