Mississippi

Mississippi lawmakers have approved the most radical and costly change to the state’s personal income tax system to date. House Bill 1 ultimately eliminates the state's personal income tax and cuts state revenues by nearly $2.7 billion a year when fully implemented. This deeply regressive legislation will create a windfall for the wealthiest residents of the poorest state in the nation while simultaneously jeopardizing the state’s ability to fund public services that support Mississippians and the state’s economy.

At a time when states across the country are forecasting deficits or anticipating slowing revenue growth, Mississippi lawmakers are debating deeply regressive and expensive tax cuts that would overwhelmingly benefit their state’s richest residents.

Governors and legislative leaders in a dozen states have made calls to fully eliminate their taxes on personal or corporate income, after many states already deeply slashed them over the past few years. The public deserves to know the true impact of these plans, which would inevitably result in an outsized windfall to states’ richest taxpayers, more power in the hands of wealthy households and corporations, extreme cuts to basic public services, and more deeply inequitable state tax codes.

Not only is Mississippi's latest tax proposal deeply inequitable, the state simply cannot afford it.

History has repeatedly shown that such policies harm state economies, dismantle basic public services, and exacerbate tax inequities.

Recent proposals in both Mississippi and West Virginia seek to pare back, and ultimately eliminate, each state’s income tax while shifting the responsibility of funding services even more onto low- and middle-income taxpayers through increased consumption taxes. The states are moving forward with this tax experiment even though a similar experiment notoriously and immediately sent Kansas into a financial tailspin.