Appliance installation is now taxed in North Carolina.

What’s the latest big idea out of Raleigh? Applying the sales tax to museum gift shops.

That proposal, included in a proposed tax bill that was circulating last week around the Legislative Building, would apply the tax to any museum shop purchase, and to any sales by a nonprofit group to benefit a school or a state agency, such as a state-run historic site.

Exempt would be sales at concession stands in a high school’s stadium. One gathers that the honorable legislators who drafted this bill don’t go to museums very much, but they do watch the home game.

This is sadly typical of the nickel-and-diming of the Tar Heel taxpayer that our elected leaders have been foisting on us.

Over at the DMV office, the cost of an eight-year driver’s license has gone from $32 to $40. The motor vehicle registration fee has gone from $28 to $36.

Community college tuition is going from $72 to $76 per credit hour for in-state residents. For a full-time student — who may be going to a community college because he or she can’t afford to attend a state university yet — that charge adds up.

The fee for a medical test for newborns, which all new parents are required to pay, is up from $19 to $24, as of Oct. 1.

Leaders in the legislature have been trumpeting how much they’ve cut the state income tax. Ordinary taxpayers, however, may find they’re putting all that windfall (and maybe a little more) into new sales taxes and fees. We’ve noted, however, how sales taxes now apply to charges on auto and appliance repairs.

And with the current crowd in Raleigh, it looks like we can expect more of the same. Earlier this month, the legislature’s Revenue Laws Study Committee held a hearing on ideas to improve the state tax code.

The Honorables called on only one set of experts — from a conservative-leaning Washington think tank called the Tax Foundation. The Tax Foundation’s gurus basically told the Honorables what they wanted to hear: that North Carolina is doing great, but we’re going to have to broaden the sales tax if we want to catch up with South Carolina and Mississippi.

One Tax Foundation spokesman suggested more sales taxes on services — as long as (according to one news account) they don’t tax “service-related transactions between businesses.”

In other words, tap ol’ Joe Sixpack again. He shouldn’t be spending so much on beer.

Our leaders feel toward the income tax the way vampires feel toward crosses, and Baptists toward pole dancing. Their regard for sales taxes approaches a religious fervor. It seems clear that at least some of them would like to see North Carolina go the way of Texas and Florida and do without income tax entirely.

— The Gaston Gazette