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Mississippi lawmakers to study tax cuts with committees, summit

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mississippitoday.org – Bobby Harrison – 2024-08-27 12:33:23

Mississippi lawmakers to study tax cuts with committees, summit

The two presiding of the Mississippi have formed special committees to further their goals of providing additional tax cuts during the 2025 legislative .

On Tuesday, House Speaker Jason White, who earlier this year formed a special tax cut study committee, announced a day-long policy summit on tax cuts for Sept. 24. Also on Tuesday, Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, who presides over the Senate, announced he has formed a special committee to study the ‘s fiscal policy.

The committee will be led by the chairs of the Senate’s two money committees, Senate Appropriations Chairman Briggs Hopson and Finance Chairman Josh Harkins.

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“Our ultimate goal is always to lower the tax burden and ensure taxpayer dollars stay in taxpayer pockets,” Hosemann said in a news release. “This requires Appropriations and Finance leadership to be at the table looking at all income and expenses to ensure we are being as efficient as possible while fully funding necessary services.”

Both Gov. Tate Reeve and White have advocated eliminating the state’s income tax, which accounts for about 30% of the state general fund revenue, while White also has spoken of reducing the state’s grocery tax.

Hosemann has voiced support for at least reducing the 7% grocery tax, which is the highest statewide tax on food in the nation.

Hosemann has said that ensuring the fiscal integrity of the state should not be ignored when looking at tax cuts.

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The income tax generates about $2 a year while it has been estimated, based on a 2019 study, that the grocery tax generates about $325 million a year. But the grocery tax would generate much more now than in 2019 because of the significant increase in grocery prices. Since the 7% sales tax is imposed on the cost of groceries, state Economist Corey Miller has said that has provided significantly more revenue from the grocery tax in recent years for the state.

In 2022, the Legislature passed and Reeves signed into law a $525 million income tax cut that is currently being enacted. When fully enacted in 2026, income in Mississippi will be taxed at a rate of 4%.

In addition, a business tax cut enacted in 2016 is still being phased in — $42 million annually through 2029 before fully enacted.

The clamor for additional tax cuts has been intensified in large part because of the unprecedented growth in revenue collections in recent years. Most states have experienced similar growth thanks primarily to the large influx of federal funds provided to states primarily to deal with the pandemic. In addition, revenue growth has been aided by Mississippi being so heavily reliant on the sales tax for its revenue. As prices of retail items have increased during the inflationary period, that has resulted in the 7% sales tax being levied on more expensive items generating more revenue for the state.

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Still, during the past year, revenue collections have been slowing. For the past fiscal year, which ended June 30, the state collected only $18.4 million or .24% more than was collected the previous year.

And if not for collecting $68.7 million or 84.4% more in interest earnings than the previous fiscal year, the state would have been in the rare situation of collecting less revenue than the previous year for only the sixth time since 1970. Higher interest rates have spurred the increased earnings on the unprecedented surplus funds the state currently has.

Multiple speakers are for White’s tax summit at the Sheraton Refuge in Flowood, including Gov. Reeves, legislative leaders, other state officials and legislators from Arkansas who have worked on tax cuts in the neighboring state. National tax cut proponent Grover Norquest also is scheduled to speak.

“It is exciting to be assembling this policy summit that will be to the public to encourage engagement from all interested parties so lawmakers, tax experts, and any Mississippian can partake in robust conversation that will to a better, brighter Mississippi,” White said in a news release.

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Other members of the Hosemann study group include Sens. Andy Berry, Bradford Blackmon, Rod Hickman, Chris Johnson, Dean Kirby, John Polk, Derrick Simmons and Daniel Sparks.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Mississippi Today

A Mississippi town moves a Confederate monument that became a shrouded eyesore

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mississippitoday.org – Emily Wagster Pettus, Associated Press – 2024-09-18 14:17:57

GRENADA (AP) — A Mississippi town has taken down a Confederate monument that stood on the courthouse square since 1910 — a figure that was tightly wrapped in tarps the past four years, symbolizing the community’s enduring division over how to commemorate the past.

Grenada’s first Black mayor in two decades seems determined to follow through on the city’s plans to relocate the monument to other public land. A concrete slab has already been poured behind a fire station about 3.5 miles (5.6 kilometers) from the square.

But a new fight might be developing. A Republican lawmaker from another part of Mississippi wrote to Grenada saying she believes the city is violating a law that restricts the relocation of war memorials or monuments.

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The Grenada City Council voted to move the monument in 2020, weeks after police killed George Floyd in Minneapolis. The vote seemed timely: Mississippi legislators had just retired the last state flag in the U.S. that prominently featured the Confederate battle emblem.

The tarps went up soon after the vote, shrouding the Confederate soldier and the pedestal he stood on. But even as people complained about the eyesore, the move was delayed by tight budgets, state bureaucracy or political foot-dragging. Explanations vary, depending on who’s asked.

A new mayor and city council took office in May, prepared to take action. On Sept. 11, with little advance notice, police blocked traffic and a work crew disassembled and the 20-foot (6.1-meter) stone structure.

“I’m glad to see it move to a different location,” said Robin Whitfield, an artist with a studio just off Grenada’s historic square. “This represents that something has changed.”

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Still, Whitfield, who is white, said she wishes Grenada leaders had invited the community to engage in dialogue about the symbol, to bridge the gap between those who think moving it is erasing history and those who see it as a daily reminder of white supremacy. She was among the few people watching as a crane lifted parts of the monument onto a flatbed truck.

“No one ever talked about it, other than yelling on Facebook,” Whitfield said.

Mayor Charles Latham said the monument has been “quite a divisive figure” in the town of 12,300, where about 57% of are Black and 40% are white.

“I understand people had family and stuff to fight and die in that war, and they should be proud of their family,” Latham said. “But you’ve got to understand that there were those who were oppressed by this, by the Confederate flag on there. There’s been a lot of hate and violence perpetrated against people of color, under the color of that flag.”

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The city received permission from the Mississippi Department of Archives and History to move the Confederate monument, as required. But Rep. Stacey Hobgood-Wilkes of said the fire station site is inappropriate.

“We are prepared to pursue such avenues that may be necessary to ensure that the statue is relocated to a more suitable and appropriate location,” she wrote, suggesting a Confederate cemetery closer to the courthouse square as an alternative. She said the Ladies Cemetery Association is willing to deed a parcel to the city to make it happen.

The Confederate monument in Grenada is one of hundreds in the South, most of which were dedicated during the early 20th century when groups such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy sought to shape the historical narrative by valorizing the Lost Cause mythology of the .

The monuments, many of them outside courthouses, came under fresh scrutiny after an avowed white supremacist who had posed with Confederate flags in photos posted online killed nine Black people inside the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015.

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Grenada’s monument includes images of Confederate president Jefferson Davis and a Confederate battle flag. It was engraved with praise for “the noble men who marched neath the flag of the and Bars” and “the noble women of the South,” who “gave their loved ones to our country to conquer or to die for truth and right.”

A half-century after it was dedicated, the monument’s symbolism figured in a rights march. When the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders held a mass rally in Grenada in June 1966, Robert Green of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference scrambled up the pedestal and planted a U.S. flag above the image of Davis.

The cemetery is a spot Latham himself had previously advocated as a new site for the monument, but he said it’s too late to change now, after the city already budgeted $60,000 for the move.

“So, who’s going to pay the city back for the $30,000 we’ve already expended to relocate this?” he said. “You should’ve showed up a year and a half ago, two years ago, before the city gets to this point.”

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A few other Confederate monuments in Mississippi have been relocated. In July 2020, a Confederate soldier statue was moved from a prominent spot at the University of Mississippi to a Civil War cemetery in a secluded part of the Oxford campus. In May 2021, a Confederate monument featuring three soldiers was moved from outside the Lowndes County Courthouse in Columbus to another cemetery with Confederate soldiers.

Lori Chavis, a Grenada City Council member, said that since the monument was covered by tarps, “it’s caused nothing but more divide in our city.”

She said she supports relocating the monument but worries about a . She acknowledged that people probably didn’t know until recently exactly where it would reappear.

“It’s tucked back in the woods, and it’s not visible from even pulling behind the fire station,” Chavis said. “And I think that’s what got some of the citizens upset.”

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This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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Crooked Letter Sports Podcast

Podcast: New Orleans sports columnist and author Jeff Duncan joins the podcast to talk about his new Steve Gleason book and the new-look New Orleans Saints.

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mississippitoday.org – Rick Cleveland and Tyler Cleveland – 2024-09-18 10:00:00

Jeff Duncan went from the Mississippi Book in on Saturday to Jerry World in Dallas on Sunday where he watched and wrote about the Saints’ total dismantling of the Dallas Cowboys. We about both and also about what happened in high school and college football last and what’s coming up this weekend.

Stream all episodes here.

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This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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Mississippi Today

On this day in 1899

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mississippitoday.org – Jerry Mitchell – 2024-09-18 07:00:00

Sept. 18, 1899

Credit: Wikipedia

Scott Joplin, known as “the King of Ragtime,” copyrighted the “Maple Leaf Rag,” which became the first song to sell more than 1 million copies of sheet music. The popularity launched a sensation surrounding ragtime, which has been called America’s “first classical music.” 

Born near Texarkana, , Joplin grew up in a musical . He worked on the railroad with other family members until he was able to earn money as a musician, traveling across the South. He wound up playing at the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893, where he met fellow musician Otis Saunders, who encouraged him to write down the songs he had been making up to entertain audiences. In all, Joplin wrote dozens of ragtime songs. 

After some , he moved to New York , hoping he could make a living while stretching the boundaries of music. He wrote a ragtime ballet and two operas, but success in these new forms eluded him. He was buried in a pauper’s grave in New York City in 1917. 

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More than six decades later, his music was rediscovered, initially by Joshua Rifkin, who recorded Joplin’s songs on a record, and then Gunther Schuller of the New England Conservatory, who performed four of the ragtime songs in concert: “My faculty, many of whom had never even heard of Joplin, were saying things like, ‘My gosh, he writes melodies like Schubert!’” 

Joplin’s music won over even more admirers through the 1973 , “The Sting,” which won an Oscar for the music. His song, “The Entertainer,” reached No. 3 on Billboard and was ranked No. 10 among “Songs of the Century” list by the Recording Industry Association of America. His opera “Treemonisha” was produced to wide acclaim, and he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his special contribution to American music. 

“The ragtime craze, the faddish thing, will obviously die down, but Joplin will have his position secure in American music history,” Rifkin said. “He is a treasurable composer.”

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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