August 17, 2016 – In a state already laboring under severe deficits, Mississippi’s Republican super-majority continues to implement deep budget cuts, the latest of which directly threaten some of Mississippi’s most vulnerable citizens.

“I’m very concerned about the plight of the poor, who are the first to suffer,” said Jackson Rep. Kathy Sykes.  “It may not hit everybody at first, but it is coming.  Poor people are the canaries in the coalmine.  We’re the first to suffer, and then it tends to spread.  The shame is that a lot of the folks who are or will be affected are the same people who voted for these elected officials who are insensitive to their plight.  This should be a wake-up call to all Mississippians that they need to hold all of us accountable.”

A Department of Revenue document reveals that the state generated $887.8 million less than anticipated by revenue estimates from April 2015.  Critics like Sykes and Rep. David Baria, D-Bay St. Louis, say multiple tax cuts during the last four years of Gov. Phil Bryant’s term are a major contributor to the slow revenue.

The Sun Herald reported that Bryant and the legislature approved more than $300 million in tax breaks and credits, including a $126 million reduction in business inventory taxes, as well as alterations to the state’s method for calculating business taxes.  Added to those cuts are multiple sales tax breaks for developers, as well as a series of “tax-free holidays.”

Despite the fact that the tax giveaways were driving down revenue, Bryant quickly signed yet another tax cut this year — one of the biggest in the state’s history — amounting to nearly $415 million in revenue loss over the next 12 years.  The tax cut created by Senate Bill 2858, which is now law, not only destroys the state’s franchise tax, but also reduces personal income taxes paid by individuals.  And while the new law eliminates more than $400 million in revenue, its benefits to individual taxpayers are marginal.  Under the law, the state will exempt the first $10,000 of earnings from state income tax.  Mississippi residents earning $16,000 or less will only save an average of $14 a year, while those earning more than $150,000 will save about $270 annually.

Even though Bryant made two separate mid-year budget cuts and the state raided the Rainy Day Fund for $45 million while managing to grab a massive one-time payment from a Mississippi Attorney General’s Office settlement, the slashed revenue has forced legislators to revise revenue estimates downward twice just since April 2015.  As a result, nothing could stop the state from going into June with about a $200 million shortfall.

More recently, Mississippi legislators voted in a June special session to allow the governor to raid the state’s “Rainy Day” cash reserves of another $50 million to cover the shortfalls.  While Republican legislators killed bills tapping the same reserve to fully fund education or Medicaid in previous sessions, they held no such reservation drawing on the $350 million fund to cover tax cuts.

Despite the Rainy Day raid, the state is still facing a series of cuts in valuable programs affecting the disadvantaged.  Many Mississippi community colleges, which serve middle- and low-income students, now have to raise fees as state college funding has fallen by $5 million this year.  Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College, for example, is looking at a 20 percent hike in tuition fees, while Hinds Community College will go up about 4 percent.

The Mississippi Library Commission, which offers education and internet service to many low-income or poverty-level people, now faces lay-offs, reduced hours, and possible closures as it contends with $1 million in cuts.

Making matters worse are about $8.3 million in cuts to the state’s mental health system, resulting in the closure of about 100 beds at Mississippi State Hospital at Whitfield and East Mississippi State Hospital.  The cuts will also result in the elimination of special instruction services to almost 130 mentally ill children up to age 3 at Ellisville State School, and the closure of Male Chemical Dependency Units at MSH and EMSH, offering prison as the most likely substitute for addiction-related problems.

Republican Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves offered his particularly chilling motivation behind the painful cuts, saying the various mental health programs weren’t curing anybody.

“… we have programs we’re spending money on that aren’t working,” Reeves told online news organization Mississippi Today. “You should have asked the Department of Mental Health:  The program they’re shutting down, 750 patients they had last year, how many of those have repeated a similar program either in the Department of Mental Health or outside the Department of Mental Health?”

Reeves’ opinion runs counter to professional opinion that many forms of mental illness cannot be cured so much as treated, often requiring a lifetime of medicine or therapy.

Sykes said some Republicans who voted in favor of the tax cuts regretted their decision to support these efforts, but were powerless to vote any other way.

“In private conversations with some of my Republican colleagues, they are getting concerned about the pressure they’re feeling to vote a certain way.  The moderates, in particular, are really beginning to express concern,” Sykes said.  “They’re told to toe the party line, and they can’t be sensitive to the needs of their own people.  They’re powerless.”

She would not name any of the “moderate Republicans” because she feared the label, itself, would work against them in their next primary.  She, like other Democrats, complains that Bryant is a lame duck plodding through his last term, so he can afford to ignore the pain of his own voters, and he can use his campaign war chest to influence other elections by “primarying” Republicans who do not do what they are told.

“That’s why (GOP) moderates can’t adopt an open stance on issues that bother them,” Sykes said.  “This really isn’t democracy anymore.”

Source: MS NAACP State Conference