On this day in 1960

by Jerry Mitchell, Mississippi Today
March 16, 2025

March 16, 1960

Inspired by the Greensboro sit-in a month earlier, Black students staged sit-ins at whites-only lunch counters in eight downtown stores in Savannah, Georgia. 

Students Carolyn Quilloin Coleman, Joan Tyson Hall and Ernest Robinson stepped into Levy’s Department Store, shopping before entering the segregated Azalea Room. The server ordered them to leave, but they attempted to order anyway. Police hauled them to jail, where they sang, “We Shall Overcome.” 

Robinson recalled looking at his hand where he scrawled the words of a Psalm: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.” 

“That verse uplifted us,” Coleman told the Savannah Morning News. “We were very familiar with what had happened to Emmett Till, a 14-year-old student who was killed in Mississippi for allegedly whistling at a White girl across the street. While we thought that we were safe in Savannah, we knew that anything could happen.” 

In response, Black leaders W.W. Law, Hosea Williams and Eugene Gadsden organized a boycott of city businesses and led voter registration drives that brought changes to city government. Seven months later, Savannah repealed its ordinance requiring segregated lunch counters. The boycott continued until all facilities were desegregated in October 1963. 

Months later, Martin Luther King Jr. arrived to hail the passing of Jim Crow ways. The Levy’s Department Store building now houses the Savannah College of Art and Design’s Jen Library, and a historic marker now honors the students’ fight for freedom.

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

The quiet part out loud: Mississippi political leaders tolerate tax burden on poor

by Bobby Harrison, Mississippi Today
March 16, 2025

Former Gov. Haley Barbour finally said the quiet part out loud.

During a recent speech to the Mississippi State University Stennis Institute of Government and Capitol Press Corps, the former two-term governor and master communicator said taxing groceries was a good thing because everybody has to eat.

Barbour reasoned that it is important for all people to have skin in the game — to pay taxes — because “otherwise, they will vote to pave the streets with gold if they don’t have to pay anything.”

Various conservative politicians and other policymakers espouse the Barbour philosophy that a tax on food is fair and necessary. To ensure that poor people pay taxes, too, they advocate for a grocery tax that absorbs a much greater percentage of the income of low income families.

The quiet part out loud is a reference to the fact that as governor from 2004 until 2012, Barbour blocked legislative efforts to eliminate the grocery tax and offset that lost revenue, at least in part by increasing the tax on cigarettes. Barbour vetoed two bills in 2006: one to eliminate the highest in the nation 7% tax on food and the other to cut in half the levy on groceries.

Veto messages are where governors articulate their reasoning for opposing legislation. In neither veto of the grocery tax cut bills did the governor talk about “fairness.”

Instead, he talked about the fact that the combination of cutting or eliminating the grocery tax and increasing the cigarette tax was not revenue neutral. The legislation, Barbour argued at the time, would produce less revenue for the state.

He maintained that it sent the wrong message to cut taxes at a time when he was going to Congress to try to secure federal funds to help with the recovery from the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina. And in fairness to the governor, Hurricane Katrina was the seminal event of Barbour’s tenure as governor and one of the seminal events in the state’s history, and his ability to obtain those funds was paramount for the success of the Gulf Coast and south Mississippi.

So it is fair to say Katrina was heavy on Barbour’s mind in 2006 when the Legislature sent him the bills to cut the grocery tax.

It is clear, though, that Mississippi’s political leadership still has similar views as Barbour on the grocery tax. Since Barbour has left office, there have been two major reductions in the income tax: one in 2016 when Phil Bryant was governor and another in 2022 when Tate Reeves was governor.

There has been no cut in the grocery tax during that time.

This year the Senate proposes another major cut in the income tax and a reduction in the grocery tax from 7 cents to 5 cents on every dollar purchase of groceries.

There are efforts by the House leadership and Reeves to completely eliminate the income tax. In addition, the House tax cut plan essentially would trim the grocery tax to 5.5%. The House plan in most instances also would raise the sales tax on most other retail items from 7% to 8.5%.

And there are retail items other than groceries that most all people need. After all, most everyone, including poor people who might not pay an income tax, must buy clothes, household utensils and numerous other retail items that under the House plan would cost more because of the increase in the sales tax.

In short, there are many opportunities other than the grocery tax to collect taxes from poor people.

But just to recap:

• Only 12 states tax food like Mississippi does.

• Mississippi not only has the highest state-imposed tax on food, but also has one of the country’s highest sales taxes on other retail items.

• Mississippi has one of the lowest income taxes in the country and it is getting even lower thanks to the 2022 tax cut that is still being phased in.

The aforementioned tax structure results in Mississippi’s low-wage earners paying a greater percentage of their income in state and local taxes than do the state’s more affluent residents, a 2024 study found.

The report by the Institute of Taxation and Economic Policy found that Mississippi has the nation’s 19th-most regressive tax system where low-income residents are forced to pay a larger percentage of their income in taxes than the state’s wealthier citizens.

The study shows the income tax is the only component of the Mississippi tax system that requires the wealthy to pay more than the poor.

And even though Mississippi has the nation’s highest percentage of poor people, the quiet part that needs to be told louder is that our leaders are working to make the tax structure even more regressive.

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

House and Senate negotiations over proposals to drastically overhaul Mississippi’s tax code appear to be at a standstill as lawmakers weigh the impact federal spending cuts could have on one of the nation’s poorest and most federally-dependent states. 

With only weeks left in the 2025 session, lawmakers are pushing different proposals behind the scenes to see if Mississippi can pull off an experiment that no other state has accomplished: Eliminating an income tax after having it on the books for more than a century.

The negotiations, which House Speaker Jason White said “appeared to have stalled” last week, are unfolding as the Trump administration and Republican-controlled Congress are floating massive spending cuts. Mississippi relies on the federal government for revenue more than almost any other state, with more than 40% of its annual budget coming from federal dollars. Deep federal spending cuts alongside the elimination or drastic reduction of the state income tax could reduce Mississippi’s ability to fund services, experts told Mississippi Today.  

The House leadership, early in the session, advanced a proposal that would eliminate the income tax over the next decade, trim the state’s grocery tax, raise sales taxes and add a new sales tax on gasoline. 

Weeks later, the Senate passed a less ambitious tax plan that cuts the income tax, raises the gasoline tax over several years and trims the grocery tax. The plan does not fully eliminate the income tax, which the House leadership and Republican Gov. Tate Reeves say is their main focus. 

Proponents of eliminating the income tax say doing so would unleash economic growth by attracting corporate investment and new residents fleeing higher-tax states. Such growth would offset potential revenue losses in a state that has enjoyed a budget surplus in recent years, they argue.

Economists, however, are divided on whether such growth would blunt the impact of potential budget shortfalls in a poverty-stricken state.

Neva Butkus, a senior analyst at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, published an analysis late last month on the tax proposals moving through each chamber. The organization’s modeling estimates the Senate plan would result in $876 million in lost revenue. The House plan would reduce state revenues by $2.1 billion compared to taxes today – a 30 percent reduction of the state’s current general fund, the organization projected. These numbers are for the state general fund and do not deduct the tax increases in the respective plans that would generate revenue for roads and local governments.

“At a time when states across the country are forecasting deficits or anticipating slowing revenue growth, Mississippi lawmakers are debating deeply regressive and expensive tax cuts that would overwhelmingly benefit their state’s richest residents,” Butkus wrote. “Cutting revenues while shifting taxes away from the state’s richest residents to low- and moderate-income families who already struggle to make ends meet is shortsighted.”

Republican House Speaker Jason White, one of the loudest voices calling for income tax elimination, said the federal cuts floated by national Republicans thus far haven’t convinced him legislators should hold off on approving new tax cuts. 

He told reporters this week that House leaders have continued to meet with Senate officials to work out a deal. He remains flexible on what a final proposal could include, but remains committed to finding a path to complete elimination of the income tax, instead of just a cut. 

“The Senate has kicked around this idea that they might entertain total elimination, but over a very long period of time,” White said. “We’re trying to see exactly what that looks like, should it involve (revenue growth) triggers. We would be open to triggers … For us, if we’re going to go that far on some of these issues, we would want to include total elimination.”

White and other proponents of income tax elimination view the income tax as an unfair burden on working people. Nine other states — including nearby Florida, Texas and Tennessee — don’t have a state income tax. Proponents of elimination argue that Mississippi is at a competitive disadvantage.

Leaders of the 52-member Senate have been tighter-lipped, but they’ll likely meet before a key Tuesday deadline to either offer their original tax cut plan again or advance a new proposal for the House to consider. 

Senate Finance Chairman Josh Harkins, the chamber’s lead negotiator, told Mississippi Today that the Senate wants to cut taxes but would only agree to a plan that won’t drain state coffers.

And the Flowood Republican says his Senate colleagues are deeply concerned that the tens of billions the state receives from the federal government every year could be frozen or reduced by the spending cuts congressional Republicans and President Donald Trump are considering.

“Any cuts that the federal government is contemplating are going to trickle down at some level, and it’s going to impact us,” Harkins said. 

House and Senate leaders both want tax cut legislation to be paired with a plan to ensure the state’s employee retirement system, which has debt of roughly $25 billion, remains solvent for the long term. But they haven’t reached consensus on how to do that.  

An unknown variable in the legislative equation is what Republican Gov. Tate Reeves is willing to do to achieve his stated goal of eliminating the income tax. 

In social media posts, Reeves has repeated his support for total elimination of the income tax, and dared the Senate, which is led by Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, to oppose the policy. But the second-term governor has offered no plan of his own this year and has largely been absent from the Capitol during the debate. If the two chambers cannot agree on a final plan, he could call them into a special session and use his bully pulpit to try to force a compromise. 

READ MORE: ‘Not COVID. It’s Trump’: Lawmakers prepare for tumultuous Trumpenomics by … upending state tax structure

While the state’s top politicians debate whether Mississippi, a state that has failed to fix its high poverty rate and whose agencies continue to deal with costly lawsuits and federal investigations, national experts have cautioned that drastic tax cuts alongside a reduction in federal funding could cripple the state economy if lawmakers aren’t prudent. 

Justin Theal, senior officer at The Pew Charitable Trusts, said across the country state budget stresses are more widespread than they have been at any time since at least the COVID-19 pandemic struck in 2020, before any federal cuts were on the table.

This trajectory means legislators will need to consider how changes at both the state and federal levels could put state revenues at risk of chronically falling short of ongoing spending, Theal added.

“Federal spending cuts could ripple through Mississippi’s broader economy, particularly in sectors that depend on federal funding, contracts, or employees,” Theal said. “This could, in turn, increase demand for public services at a time when budget flexibility is already tightening.”

States that have a smaller tax bases stand to bear the brunt of slashed revenues and cuts to federal programs, said Lucy Dadayan, principal research associate with the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.

“The uncertainty is even bigger for states like Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama and other states that have high reliance on federal funding and low fiscal capacity.” 

In late February, the Republican-controlled U.S. House passed a GOP budget blueprint with $4.5 trillion in tax breaks and $2 trillion in spending cuts despite fierce opposition from Democrats and discomfort among some Republicans.

A significant chunk of the federal budget is spent on health care, food stamps, student loans and other social service programs, which Democrats and even some Republicans worry could be on the chopping block. The implications could be dire for a poor state like Mississippi, some fear.  

“While other states are preserving revenues in anticipation of reductions to federal dollars that help deliver programs like SNAP, Medicaid, and education resources, Mississippi lawmakers are instead considering costly and regressive tax cuts,”  Butkus wrote.

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