The Mississippi Senate last week passed a tax cut bill that would reduce income tax in certain brackets, reduce self-employment taxes on small business and eliminate the franchise tax.
“As a conservative Republican, I believe Mississippi can reduce the size of government and direct funds to priorities like public schools and infrastructure while putting more money into taxpayers’ pockets,” Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves said.
We hope that he is right and that Mississippi does not step off into the abyss with Louisiana where eight years under Bobby Jindal as governor has left the state struggling to cover a $1.6 billion deficit.
Jindal shamelessly pursued his quixotic run for the presidency mostly at state expense while unabashedly cutting taxes on higher income residents, businesses and industry and cutting services to lower income and impoverished residents and blaming the state’s problems on President Obama.
(Certainly the drop in oil prices has become a factor in Louisiana’s woes, but a $1 billion deficit had been forecast while oil prices were still high.)
Annual budgets under the Jindal administration soon soaked up the $1 billion surplus from Katrina money the state had on hand in 2008 when he took office. Subsequent budgets then soaked up every source of rainy day set-asides and one-time monies that the governor and his legislative cohorts could put their hands on. State officials are now left with the bitter aftertaste of the Jindal Koolaid they all so willingly gulped.
“Bobby Jindal was a better cult leader than Jim Jones,” popular Jefferson Parrish Sheriff, a popular Republican official in Louisiana told a meeting of the Metropolitan Crime Commission in New Orleans last month, also admitting: “I endorsed that idiot.”
If ever a corporate welfare queen were selected, Jindal would surely reign. His handouts from Louisiana coffers included:
• Duck Dynasty, the most popular show in A & E history — $330,000 per episode. (Think about that the next time Phil Robertson rants about people on welfare.);
• $700,000 to Walmart to build two new stores in affluent suburbs;
• $10 million to Valero to expand its refinery at Norco, an expansion that would create 43 new jobs.
Meanwhile, Jindal’s budgets cut Louisiana’s higher education by $300 million; its health care budget by $200 million.
Certainly, Lieutenant Governor Reeves should not be compared to former Louisiana Governor Jindal, but we should beware of drinking the supply-side elixir that assumes that cutting taxes for business, industry and the wealthy will automatically produce more jobs because those tax savings will be reinvested into the economy to produce more jobs. As general policy it has failed, not only in Louisiana but in Kansas, which state is struggling to recover from Governor Sam Brownback’s income tax cuts in 2012 and 2013; in Scott Walker’s Wisconsin, which faces a $2.2 billion shortfall by mid-2017. And so on.
Everyone wants to pay less in taxes, but we hope that before the Legislature takes that plunge it will have identified specific savings in government operations that will make up the difference.