State’s shortfalls foreshadowed by Louisiana, Kansas

Elsewhere in this edition you can read about the Mississippi State Department of Health’s decision to eliminate its District I Health Office in Batesville and consolidate it with other offices, reducing the number of district offices from nine to three. Also mentioned are consolidation of some county services, immunizations among them.
All across the spectrum, reductions in state funding are triggering employee layoffs and reduction of services to Mississippians. More services provided by the state are being pushed back to the county and municipal level. School funding has been reduced. Even the North Mississippi Regional Center in Oxford has been affected.
None of this is new. It was much the same in Louisiana under former Governor Bobby Jindal and appears to have started in Kansas in 2011 with the election of Gov. Sam Brownback.
In 2010 Brownback was elected Kansas governor on a promise of slashing taxes for business owners and lowering personal income tax rates. He promised thousands of new jobs and economic rebirth in Kansas as a result. Sound familiar?
Instead Kansas residents saw massive budget shortfalls that reduced basic services such as road maintenance and funding for education budgets and at the same time Kansas lagged behind neighboring states in major job category.
Ditto Louisiana. Taxes were cut with the promise that the shortfall in government revenue would be offset by an economic boom that would surely follow. Didn’t happen.  Sound familiar? Louisiana’s present governor and legislature are scrambling to regain lost ground.
But the Mississippi Legislature, when it became peopled with a veto-proof Republican super-majority after the 2015 elections, learned little from either Kansas or Louisiana. Instead it set itself on a course that cut or will cut corporate taxes and income taxes and provide other concessions to business interests and the wealthy, all in the expectation that the revenue shortfalls will be offset by an economic boom to be generated by those tax cuts.
Hasn’t happened here either, and that’s a major reason why we are seeing services cut statewide and right here in Panola County.
Last week in Kansas, in a strident pushback on Brownback, the Republican-controlled legislature overrode Gov. Brownback’s veto of a bill that would undo some of his tax cuts and raise $1.2 billion in revenue.
There is a lesson for our state as well. A course correction will have to come from the Republicans who control the legislature. Insisting that cutting taxes across-the-board on the wealthy will sufficiently stimulate the economy to offset the lost government revenue has proven itself unworkable — in Kansas, in Louisiana and now in Mississippi.
No one wants to pay more than his or her fair share in taxes, and we all want the best possible service from government without waste and duplication, but that takes hard work. Instead, we have opted for an approach that looks simple on the outside but ultimately proves unworkable with implementation.