There’s an old saying, something like, “nobody can rest easy while the legislature is in session.”
This session is very unusual. The state has a $3.9 billion surplus. I can’t recall anything remotely like this.
There is a big push to use this opportunity to eliminate the state personal income tax.
In general, I am anti tax. The reason for this is simple. Most people know better how to spend their money than a government bureaucrat does. I am a diehard believer in the free market.
Just look at any credit card receipt. You will find on it an alpha-numeric transaction number capable of documenting trillions of transactions. Each one of those transactions is information that instructs manufacturers and service suppliers about what people are buying and what they need to be selling.
Those trillions of bits of information guide the free market, making it infinitely more efficient than a bureaucrat sitting in an office deciding how to spend money expropriated from free individuals. That’s one of many reasons communism was a colossal failure.
So I am anti tax.
That being said, I am, as a journalist, always inclined to contrarianism. If the crowd is moving one way, I try to get them to look at alternatives. It helps improve the public discourse.
So before tax cut mania drives Mississippians into a frenzied delirium, let’s pause to consider a few things that government has a legitimate reason to fund.
We can start with the state public employees retirement system (PERS). A recent Wall Street Journal article identified Mississippi as one of the five worst states in the nation in regard to retirement funding. The article stated Mississippi has only funded 60 percent of its retirement system. The average is around 85 percent funded.
This is not discretionary funding. This is money Mississippi is obligated to pay its retirees. It seems that the state needs to fulfill its legal (and moral) obligations before cutting out the income tax.
Then there are our prisons, which are being run by gangs because of underfunding. Nothing could be a more legitimate function of government than law and order. I think even the ardent libertarians would agree to that.
The gangs took over our prisons because 1) we didn’t pay guards enough to keep them coming back, and 2) the guards who did stay made so little money they were easily bribed to run contraband. Not a good recipe for law and order.
This doesn’t just affect prison life (which is another moral issue) but life in the free world as well. Prisons have become gang headquarters, allowing them to exercise power seamlessly both in and out of prison. No better place to recruit gang members than inside a gang-controlled prison. This greatly increases crime.
Ideally, prisons should be a model of law and order and a perfect opportunity for rehabilitation and skills training. A model prison should be a chance to teach life skills, spiritual understanding and practical job training so reform is a real possibility. If we did this, crime would go down.
Burl Cain, the new head of the Mississippi Department of Corrections (MDOC), has done wonders moving our state in this direction, but success will take money. Instead, the legislature has been cutting funding to MDOC for years and years. Perhaps the huge budget surplus could be used to address this situation.
If Mississippi does not address its deteriorating prison situation, then the feds will take over our prisons, as they have done in Alabama, forcing the legislature to spend $1.3 billion. It would be better if the state legislature could take the initiative instead of waiting for a federal takeover.
Mental health is another area that the state has dropped the ball. Currently the Department of Mental Health (DMH) is under a court order to move away from big box centralized institutions to community-based treatments.
This is an area where the state legislature could take initiative by working with the federal court monitor and the DMH to craft a solution. Ironically, this would save Mississippi hundreds of millions by shifting costs away from state-funded institutions to Medicaid-funded community solutions.
The elephant in the room is Medicaid expansion. For a decade, the legislature has turned down a billion dollars a year in federal funding that would save our rural hospitals from collapse. Instead we get something like “We ain’t doing none of that Obamacare stuff.” Mississippi is one of 11 states in the nation to be so obstinate.
It’s not wise for the poorest state in the nation to turn down that kind of money — money that would only go to low-income households with jobs. It’s crazy to give Medicaid to people who don’t work and then to deny it to low income people who do work.
In a recent Emmerich Newspapers poll, 748 people voted to expand Medicaid while 171 voted against expansion. That’s overwhelming.
But no, instead our governor wants to pass a bill banning a problem that doesn’t exist — the use of woke pronouns in our schools. That’s just pandering while we have very real problems that need to be addressed.
