JACKSON - The incoming Barbour administration of course doesn't want to talk about raising taxes, having repeatedly disavowed such a notion in the recent campaign.
Significantly, however, it has brought on board the guy who was chief legislative engineer of the last big state tax hike 11 years ago.
And therein may lie a well-kept secret that some tax hike may emerge in the state's near future.
In any case, when Gov.-elect Haley Barbour picked former state Rep. Charlie Williams to be his top administrative assistant, unquestionably he got the right guy to do battle with the perennially hard-to-move Mississippi Legislature.
Williams spent 24 years in the Mississippi House as a Democrat before converting to the GOP in 1999 as an unsuccessful candidate for governor. As a lawmaker, the onetime Ole Miss baseball star, noted on the ball diamond for his hustle, showed that same bulldog tenacity in the halls of the Legislature.
His most notable performance - perhaps ironic in light of the anti-tax campaign rhetoric of his new boss - came in 1992 when Williams rammed through a 1-cent increase in the state sales tax for public education. He then led the charge to nullify a veto of the bill by the state's last Republican governor.
There's already been just a slight hint in remarks Barbour has made recently after getting caught up on the state's dismal budgetary picture that "new revenue" may be needed to save vital programs from crippling hits.
That could presage Barbour's coming to grips with what budgetary realists have been saying for three years of quick-fix financing by the Legislature: that some upward adjustments must be made in the state tax structure to yield more revenue.
At least Barbour comes into office without having made a Bush I "read my lips … no new taxes" pledge. And in bringing Charlie Williams on board, he's at least put a key player on his team who rose to the occasion back in 1992 to shore up crumbling financial support for public schools.
Back then, Williams, as chairman of House Ways and Means, teamed up with Prentiss County's Rep. Billy McCoy, newly named chairman of the House Education Committee following the retirement of highly respected Jim Simpson as the House's longtime education spokesman.
The McCoy-Williams team not only saved public education from an immediate crisis of having to go to four-day school weeks or parking school buses, they succeeded for the first time ever to dedicate a tax specifically for education purposes, even giving higher ed a share.
Of course, there were valid arguments against lawmakers raising Mississippi's general sales tax to 7 cents on the dollar, with no exception for grocery purchases.
It's a sad commentary that lawmakers had to reach once again for the most regressive tax source - the one that hits lower income families hardest - while avoiding other tax sources that have strong lobbies. But faced with a Hobbism dilemma facing them, they opted for the quickest revenue-producer.
In any case it took courage for legislators to raise any tax while knowing they would have to face voters later that year in court-ordered new elections.
Let's fast forward to where the state currently finds itself budget-wise, with a new administration headed by a governmentally untested chief executive.
From the looks of the $3.6 billion state general fund budget proposed last week by the Joint Legislative Budget Committee (LBO), Barbour and lawmakers could very well be facing in 2004 a reprise of the ox-in-the-ditch situation public education faced in 1992.
Though budgeters expressed satisfaction with their handiwork, especially that they fully funded the fourth year of the five-year teacher pay plan, the devil, as the expression goes, is in the details of the proposed state budget.
And the devil apparently has done a heap of damage to the overall funding of public education, the area most agree is the heartbeat of the state's hopes for a better tomorrow.
Worried state Department of Education leaders say that if the 2005 LBO recommended budget allocations for all public school programs is not infused with additional funds by the Legislature, education would suffer a $200 million cut.
The prized Mississippi Adequate Education Program, which when enacted in 1998 kept the state out of the courts where many other states have found themselves for failing to subsidize poorer tax-base districts, would be hardest hit.
Alone, with last year's one-time special fund money not available, MAEP would get $161.1 million less under the proposed 2005 budget than it got in 2004.
"At a time when education was making significant forward strides, we cannot afford to go backward," declared veteran Deputy Superintendent of Education Judy Rhodes, who is director of educational accountability.
"The investments in kindergarten and reform programs we began making under the 1982 Education Reform Act are just now really paying off," Rhodes added.
Of course, education in the new general fund budget is not the only highly sensitive Mississippi program that faces crippling cuts. Medicaid, the state's basic health care for 720,000 disabled and elderly poor citizens, again is in danger of having thousands being cut off unless there's a $90 million infusion for the state's share of the program's cost.
Noticeably, LBO, chaired by Lt. Gov. Amy Tuck, this time used a more conservative estimate of 2.5 percent revenue growth for 2005, unlike the pie-in-the-sky estimates of 3 and 3.5 percent they threw at Gov. Ronnie Musgrove the past two years, leaving him the unpleasant job of making mid-year cuts in agency appropriations.
And the budget-writers saved until the fine print the fact they were delaying the 2 percent "rainy day" set-aside of state appropriations for another year, plus putting next year's tobacco lawsuit settlement into the general fund rather than in the Tobacco Trust Fund as it was initially intended.
