July 1 will see winners and losers across the state courtesy of the Mississippi Legislature and Gov. Tate Reeves.

 

The sales tax on groceries will drop from 7% to 5% providing a win to consumers. The benefit will apply to retail sales of food or drink for human consumption not purchased with government food stamps.

 

At the same time consumers will lose as the excise tax at gas pumps moves from 18 cents-per-gallon to 21 cents, the first of three annual 3 cent hikes. After that the excise tax may increase 1 cent-per-gallon every other year based on changes in the National Highway Construction Cost Index.

 

Major changes to the Mississippi Public Employees Retirement System benefit package will not take effect until 2026, however the rate employers’ must pay to PERS on each employee’s salary will increase by one-half percent. This will be the second of five such annual increases. The losers here are local governments that must continually foot the bill for the legislature’s mismanagement of PERs funding.

 

Among the biggest losers will be government entities expecting to share in the state’s growing surpluses. House and Senate negotiators were unable to agree on the annual “Christmas tree” bill that often provides millions of dollars for special projects.

 

Coming out of the recent special session, legislative leaders touted their passage of a “conservative” budget. Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann told the Commercial Dispatch, “Amid economic uncertainty and federal funding freezes, it was important for the state to take a prudent approach in crafting the next fiscal year’s budget.”

 

Speaker of the House Jason White told reporters, “We’re happy with the budget. It’s conservative. It is well within our means. We’re going to bank almost half a billion dollars again this year. We’re going to take in that much more than we’re actually spending. So, we think we’re running our government in a prudent and common sense and conservative way.”

 

Winners in the special session include public schools and prisons which received notable increases. Most agencies received level or almost-level funding. However, with inflation all those will actually be losers.

 

“When you factor in annual inflation that amounts to a reduction of more than 5% in our operations budget for the coming year,” Mississippi State University President Mark Keenum wrote in a letter to faculty, as reported by the Commercial Dispatch. “It is very disheartening to see this lack of support when the state of Mississippi is in great fiscal shape and seeing record-setting economic development.”

 

Crawford is the author of “A Republican’s Lament: Mississippi Needs Good Government Conservatives.”