Senate Finance Chairman Josh Harkins gives an update on where negotiations stand on tax overhaul proposals in the Mississippi Legislature, and his thoughts on the differing Senate and House proposals that would include cutting or eliminating the personal income tax and raising taxes on gasoline.

READ MORE: As lawmakers look to cut taxes, Mississippi mayors and county leaders outline infrastructure needs

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

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 Seven months later, Savannah repealed its ordinance requiring segregated lunch counters.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.