The editors of The News & Observer don’t want voters to lower the cap on income taxes (from 10 percent to 7 percent). They don’t particularly like the personal and corporate income tax rates having scheduled reductions in 2019 (from 3 to 2.5 percent for corporate, and from 5.5 to 5.25 percent for personal). That’s OK.

They propose a radical restructuring:

We need a new tax structure in North Carolina. The sales tax is too high — 6.75 percent in many counties and as much as 7.5 percent in others (4.75 percent is from the state and the rest is local). The sales tax hurts people in the bottom half of income because they spend a higher share of their income on necessities. Income taxes reflect your ability to pay; if your income goes down, you pay less.

A better idea would be to cut and then cap the sales tax. It says much about Republicans’ priorities that they propose lowering the cap on the income tax but do not propose capping the insidious sales tax.

So apparently the editors are now opposed not just to raising the sales tax, but even to keeping it where it is. It’s not merely “too high,” it’s “insidious”!

But in 2016, the editors were excited to see sales taxes go up a half-cent to pay for commuter rail.

Earlier that same year, however, they were upset that Republicans had extended the sales tax to cover services. The sales tax is regressive, they correctly pointed out.

And in 2013 they were still outraged that Republicans had let a temporary one-cent sales tax increase sunset on schedule (in 2011).

It all caused me to ask for assistance. Someone please find the consistency in the N&O’s position on sales taxes, I wrote.

Now we’ve seen it go from don’t dare let it fall to don’t let it grow more expansive to hooray an increase at last to it’s insidious how big it is.

Little help?