JACKSON - Judging from the 2004 Mississippi Poll by Mississippi State University political scientists, what folks in this state are thinking about current public issues bounces all over the lot.
It reminds me of what Kenneth Toler, my old newspaper colleague, used to say about Mississippians: They are consistently inconsistent.
Dr. Steve Shaffer, whose political analysis team at MSU has been doing the poll periodically for 22 years, admits this year's results make him even more confused about what Mississippians really think.
Here's quick example you can glean from the MSU polling: While voters last year by 54 percent elected Haley Barbour governor despite his anti-tax pledge - even if it meant cuts in education funding - they actually strongly disagree with his position.
Asked in April if they favored raising taxes or cutting spending on education, 523 adult Mississippians polled said by 67 percent they favored tax increases. Only 18 percent endorsed cutting education instead of raising taxes.
Mind you, the polling was done at a time that the Legislature, faced with inadequate state revenues, was agonizing to fund public schools. When the House adopted a proposal to modestly increase some user fees for state services to raise some additional revenue, Barbour said he would veto the measure.
As a result, the session ended with the K-12 school program underfunded by $46 million, hitting 30 poorer school districts hardest and endangering jobs of 2,000 teachers unless local school property taxes are raised.
At least two-thirds of Mississippians polled by the MSU survey for the past few years have been consistent about one thing: They favor raising some taxes to prevent cuts in spending for both education and health care.
That finding flies in the face of how many lawmakers (and the governor) justify their opposition to any form of upward adjustment in the existing tax structure by claiming they are only "standing with my people" against higher taxes.
Somehow, the anti-tax chorus around the state Capitol has grown louder in recent years as the number of Republicans elected to the Legislature, or party switches, has grown, making it more difficult to get the three-fifths vote necessary to pass any revenue bill.
However, several other states in the South that faced the same dilemma as Mississippi have bitten the bullet and raised taxes to prevent damaging cuts in education and other services.
Virginia, the latest to raise taxes, is a spectacular case study because is has a Democratic governor and a Republican majority in each branch of the General Assembly.
Virginia lawmakers had been unable for almost four months to agree on funding the state budget. Democratic Gov. Mark Warner proposed $1 billion in new taxes to break the budget impasse.
Each of the two legislative branches passed tax plans larger than Warner asked for. Amazingly, two weeks ago they agreed on a $1.4 billion (yes, billion) general tax hike that included everything from cigarettes to income taxes.
Mind you, Virginia is a tobacco-growing state. It upped its tax on cigs from a mere couple of pennies per pack to 25 cents. Mississippi, where tobacco isn't grown, couldn't even raise its tax from 18 to 27 cents a pack to open mental health centers.
Virginia lawmakers upped the state sales tax a half penny to 5 percent, but they also began a step-by-step elimination of the sales tax on food, something that has been the unattainable goal in Mississippi for years.
According to the University of Virginia's Larry Sabato, the widely known Southern political authority, the state's business community was a major factor in getting the tax package through the General Assembly.
Can you imagine the Mississippi Manufacturers Association or BIPEC, the business-industry political education committee, supporting a 1 percent hike in the top bracket of the state income tax, restoring it to 6 percent where it was over 30 years ago?
It doesn't seem to bother the powerful corporate lobby at the state Capitol that income taxes on corporations account for only 30 percent of state income taxes while individual Mississippians - whose salaries are the lowest in the nation - account for the rest.
State Rep. John Mayo, D-Clarksdale, had proposed a 6 percent top income tax bracket in an across-the-board $200 million tax hike package at the 2004 session of the Legislature, but it failed to get out of the House Ways and Means Committee.
Mayo said his research indicates that while most corporations would fall in the 6 percent bracket, their proportionate share of the income tax burden would remain the same.
Now back to the MSU opinion poll:
Gradually, since the poll began in 1982 (except for a slight upsurge in 1999-2000), the percentage of respondents in this historically one-party Democratic state who think of themselves as Democrats has gradually declined.
Democrats initially held a 61 to 32 percent edge over Republicans 22 years ago. But the partisan division swung to 47 percent Republican versus 45 percent Democratic in 2000, and 46 to 43 percent in this year's poll, with 11 percent independent.
That mirrors the almost equally divided partisan split nationally with the country heading into another expected razor-thin presidential election.
And a final conundrum of Mississippians' thinking: back 22 years ago, 77 percent rated living here as excellent or good; this year it was down to 69 percent.
Does that tell you anything? I dunno.
