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A favorite political topic was in the news at both the federal and state levels last week – fiscal management.

Actually, fiscal mismanagement was the topic at the federal level.

Mounting deficits have led some lawmakers to call for a BRAC-like commission to do the heavy lifting of designing a realistic approach to address ballooning debt. “A fiscal commission is direly needed,” said Republican Senator Mike Braun of Indiana, a member of the Senate Budget Committee, reported Reuters.

Hmmm. Remember the 2010 Simpson-Bowles Commission? The bipartisan group worked hard and came up with reasonable recommendations to balance revenues and spending. Then, several Republican commissioners who helped draft the plan scuttled its final adoption. Still, that plan along with the comprehensive Back in the Black plan developed by the late Sen. Tom Coburn, a conservative Republican from Oklahoma, laid out steps still relevant today.

So much for talk. The bitter polarization now infecting Congress makes the notion of much needed bipartisan agreement on taxes and spending an absurdity.

For those who like details, read the 60 page Simpson-Bowles summary plan here: https://www.ssa.gov/history/reports/ObamaFiscal/TheMomentofTruth12_1_2010.pdf

Read Coburn’s masterful 624 page plan here: http://www.coburn.senate.gov/public//index.cfm?a=Files.Serve&File_id=bc1e2d45-ff24-4ff3-8a11-64e3dfbe94e1)

At the state level, Gov. Tate Reeves and key legislators could not agree on an official revenue estimate for fiscal year 2025. Such estimates are needed to guide the Legislature’s annual budget process and set a revenue threshold below which mid-year cuts must occur.

“Reeves balked at adopting a $7.5 billion revenue projection that was $117 million less than the most recent projection from a group of state financial experts,” reported Mississippi Public Broadcasting. “For those of us who, for instance, are very interested in cutting taxes in this legislative session, arbitrarily lowering the number, for no apparent reason, hurts our ability to justify those tax cuts,” Reeves said.

Expected new House Speaker Jason White said he did not think the less than two percent reduction would have any impact on cutting taxes. Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann said the group preferred using the same revenue estimate used this year “because revenue for the past two months has been lower than the official estimate approved for the current budget year.” The impact of year one of the massive income tax cut passed in 2022 was the reason cited for the revenue slowdown.

Legislative leaders are right to be cautious. There are three more years of income tax cuts to phase in, PERS costs keep escalating, inflation remains stubbornly high, and state economist Corey Miller projects that the state economy is likely to slow down.

Bill Crawford is a syndicated columnist from Jackson.