Columbus Dispatch. March 17, 2022.
Editorial: House Speaker takes hypocritical view on infant health care
For some time now, Mississippi’s leaders have pushed restrictive abortion laws as proof that it wants to make Mississippi the safest place for children in the nation, a place where even children yet to be born are afforded state protection.
But when it comes to children who are already born, it is a claim Mississippi cannot make. In truth, there is perhaps no more dangerous state for a living child under a year of age than Mississippi. In 2020, 293 Mississippi children died before reaching their first birthday, an infant mortality of 8.27 babies per 1,000 births – the highest rate in the nation and far higher than the national rate of 5.6. If Mississippi were a nation, its infant mortality rate would rank higher than 81 countries, according to the CIA World Factbook for the year 2020.
There is, as it turns out, something two of the most powerful people in the state — House Speaker Philip Gunn and Gov. Tate Reeves — despise more than legal abortions: Medicaid.
Medicaid — a federal and state program — provides uninsured mothers up to a year of health care coverage for their children up to age 1, but Mississippi currently provides mothers just two months of Medicaid coverage after a child’s birth.
For Mississippi, one of the 12 states that has refused to expand Medicaid to low-wage earners under the Affordable Care Act of 2010, that means many infants and their mothers go without access to health care at an age when they are most vulnerable.
During the past two years, there has been an effort in the legislature to extend that care to the full 12 months of coverage. This year, the prospects seemed particularly favorable, with the Senate approving Senate Bill 2033 by a 46-5 vote. Despite the overwhelming support for the bill, Gunn let the bill die in the House. There has been some effort to return the bill for a House vote, but Gunn remains unwilling, telling The Associated Press that he wanted no part of anything that would further expand Medicaid in Mississippi.
The extended postpartum care would cost little, and while not every Mississippi child who dies before their first birthday could be saved by having this health care coverage, it is the best, most obvious and least costly way to improve accessibility to health care for infants. In fact, five of Mississippi’s top medical associations sent a letter to Gunn in February saying as much.
The opposition to Medicaid expansion, whatever form it takes, is at this point purely ideological. In the states where Medicaid expansion has been in place for up to 12 years now, it’s not been proven to have wrecked state budgets (an early argument against expansion) but has, in fact, created jobs, ensured the survival of rural hospitals who are endangered by higher rates of uncompensated care and, most importantly, improved the health of millions of Americans.
In Mississippi, the consequences of withholding Medicaid expansion is measured in deaths, some of them little children.
For those politicians such as Gunn who espouse the moral necessity of banning abortions, it’s an especially hypocritical position to take.
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McComb Enterprise-Journal. March 18, 2022.
Editorial: Redistricted Candidates Should Not Be Disqualified From Running
Something is wrong when a candidate who has lived in the same home for 15 years is disqualified from running for office over a residency requirement.
That’s what happened to Bruce Mullins of McComb, with the decision being blamed on the once-every-decade redistricting that comes with the U.S. census.
Mullins was running for the Ward 5 seat in the upcoming city board elections. He lived in Ward 2 until the selectmen approved new ward lines this year and his home got moved to a different ward.
Because Mullins’ home is now part of Ward 5, the city’s Democratic Executive Committee said he was ineligible to run for that seat because he had not lived in the ward for two years, as state law requires.
This interpretation of the law basically means that anyone whose home gets redistricted from one ward to another is ineligible to run for office to represent his new ward or his old one. If that was accurate, over the years it could have applied to a number of candidates seeking any district office across the state — city board, county supervisor, justice court judge, even the state Legislature.
If this is the law, it’s easy to see the potential for abuse. An incumbent, worried about a specific person running against him, could lobby to have that person’s neighborhood moved to a different ward. If the Democratic Executive Committee is correct, the potential challenger would be ineligible to run in his new ward — as well as in his old one.
That cannot be right. It sounds like a strategy from decades long past, when white politicians resisting change at all costs came up with all sorts of novel strategies to keep Black people from voting and to make it difficult for Black candidates to get elected. Surely the Mississippi Code has progressed since those years.
Sure enough, Mullins has made public a 1991 opinion from the state attorney general’s office. The opinion says very clearly that redistricting is not an issue that disqualifies a candidate from running for office.
“It is the opinion of this office that a candidate whose residency is continuous and uninterrupted may apply his previous period of residency in his former district to the period he has resided in the newly created district to satisfy the residency requirements for holding office,” the opinion said.
Mullins’ residency in the same home is continuous and uninterrupted. The only thing that has changed is the ward lines, but the opinion says his continuous residency also applies to the new ward. If the opinion is correct, being moved to Ward 5 does not disqualify Mullins from the ballot.
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Tupelo Daily Journal. March 16, 2022.
Editorial: Now is not the time for Mississippi income tax elimination
With massive Washington spending, COVID-19 supply chain disruptions and the worst inflation in 40 years, now is not the time to eliminate the state income tax. Even worse would be to force a bad bill just to pass something.
Most analyses of any of the House’s multiple plans to eliminate the state income tax have come to the same conclusion: Mississippi cannot afford to do it.
The latest House version would do away with the state income tax without providing any kind of offset through sales tax increases. It is akin to the plan that nearly bankrupted Kansas. It would be absolutely disastrous. Even Speaker Philip Gunn has said before that the state cannot afford to eliminate the income tax without revenue offsets.
Mississippi has neither the population base nor other strong revenue sources (such as tourism or oil) that would allow us to absorb cutting a third of our revenue from the budget.
Yes, the state coffers are flush with money. But what is filling the coffers is a direct result of federal dollars flooding our economy to combat the economic downturn from the pandemic. It’s akin to spending one-time money on recurring expenses, which is a bad idea.
Then there is the fact that the economy is hurdling toward another recession. When that happens, state revenues tend to drop. That may not happen this time, but we don’t know yet. And we won’t know the impact of the current economic downturn for at least another 12-24 months.
All we have to do is look at the Great Recession. Mississippi saw an immediate two-year downturn in revenue. In FY2009 and FY2010, Mississippi revenue collections dropped 4% and 5.75%, respectively. On top of that, it took another three years of growth to get back to pre-recession revenue levels.
And since Mississippi’s economy always performs worse than the national economy, even economic slowdowns can hurt the state. In FY2016 and FY2017, when the national economy saw anemic growth numbers, state revenues were down both years, even if less than 1% each.
Furthermore, over the past 15-plus years, sales tax revenue has become a smaller and smaller part of the state economy while the state income tax has become a larger portion. Since FY2004, the earliest data readily available from the Mississippi Department of Revenue, sales tax revenue has dropped from making up 42% of our budget to 34%, a 20% decrease. Over the same period, the income tax has grown from 30% of the state’s total revenue to 34%, a 13% increase. Yes, both revenue sources are growing, but sales tax revenue is growing at a much slower pace.
Now is a terrible time to eliminate the state income tax. We have no idea what the next few years will look like, but we know what past trends portend for us when the national economy is fledgling.
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