As The Dispatch reported earlier this week, the proposal to overhaul Mississippi’s tax structure was killed in the Senate but then revived in the House on Tuesday – somehow shoehorned by the House into Senate Bill 2971. Don’t ask me how, but they did it. As Bill Gilmore and others have argued in this paper before – and far better than I am now – this is nothing more than a means to shift the tax burden away from the ‘haves’ and far more to the ‘have-nots’. It’s just as bad now in its reincarnated form as ever. Think about it. The tax burden of the state is shifted away from an income tax (the more you earn the more you pay) to the sales tax (the more you buy the more you pay). Who loses here? Households with lower incomes, that’s who. They must direct a greater proportion of their income to buy necessities than higher-income households do. The 3.5 percent reduction in grocery tax helps, but not enough. Unless our state plans to get by with even less money that it already does, fewer income tax dollars must be replaced by revenue from another source. The winners are the wealthier, with considerably more discretionary income. They’ll save hundreds (possibly thousands) when they buy their bass boats or third or fourth car.
Paul Mack
Columbus
