The Mississippi legislature wants to more or less eliminate the income tax and increase the sales tax. Everybody knows that this will transfer a massive part of the pitiful wealth of this state from our desperately poor to our enviably wealthy. It will devastate the treasury of Mississippi in the long run, making it even more difficult for us to hire anyone competent for any publicly-paid office. The W, one of our brightest lights, watches job candidates who want to come here rush off when salary is mentioned. The city cannot hire police candidates who can read and write once salary is mentioned. This tax cut will make our present difficulties look like the golden age.
What makes this issue villainous, if not actually evil, is that the legislators want to subsidize, in the very short term, their loss of revenue with the funds directed to Mississippi from Washington to give succor to our poor in the face of the pandemic. I wondered about this.
Many people object to any subsidy of the poor, citing the idea that the poor are lazy or worse. The poor are the hardest working people in our society. They have to be. Being poor, they have no leisure for luxuries like advanced education, cultural study, even trade training. The welfare queen is so fantastic a myth that I doubt there are ten thousand in the entire country. I wish I knew of a study that had hard data on this, but even the mothers who pop out babies to get subsidies get so little that it barely keeps them in non-nutritional food. Nearly all the poor work a lot harder than most of rest of us do, and for a lot less money and usually no benefits.
We will not expand Medicaid, even at little expense to ourselves, and even though it would save us the enormous cost of treating uninsured people. We have refused free Federal money many times that required that it be spent on the poor. It seems that the Mississippi legislature is actively making war on our poor, with this tax proposal just being the latest assault. An outsider might get it into his head that most of our poorest citizens being black is the casus belli.
Bill Gillmore, Columbus
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