The House on Friday took advantage of Senate typos — a few errant decimal points — in a bill and sent to Gov. Tate Reeves the most sweeping overhaul in taxation in modern Mississippi history.
Despite the Senate and a large number of House members voting for the plan being accidental due to the typos, Reeves has said on social media he’ll sign it into law, and that lawmakers can work bugs out in coming years.
Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, who oversees the Senate, remained mum on Friday, providing no explanation of how the typos got past Senate proofers and lawyers.
The bill would eliminate the state personal income tax and strip about $2.2 billion from the state budget while raising the tax on gasoline by 9 cents a gallon over three years, with later gas tax increases coming automatically.
Opponents of the changes say the poorest state in the union can’t afford to slash a third of its budget and still provide services to citizens, and that a shift to “regressive” taxation with an increased gasoline tax will hit poor people and those of modest means the hardest.
“The rich will continue to get richer and the poor will continue to get poorer,” said Rep. John Hines, D-Greenville, on Friday. On Thursday, he warned his colleagues that voting for the measure “will take your picture off the wall” in the Capitol — cost them reelection.
Because of the Senate’s typos, many lawmakers on Friday were unclear how quickly the income tax elimination will happen. The Senate when it voted on the plan intended it to take many years and hinge on economic growth “triggers” being met. But the decimal point typos essentially removed the triggers, meaning hundreds of millions of dollars in income tax revenue will have to be cut even if there is miniscule growth of a few million dollars.
At most, the Senate plan would eliminate the income tax over a little more than a decade — roughly the same timetable as House leaders had proposed. Senate leaders had called this foolhardy, and thought the counteroffer they sent to the House would have taken more like 20 years, dependent on growth.
Hosemann and the Republican Senate leadership had initially opposed a full elimination of the state’s already low income tax, calling for more cuts instead. They later agreed to elimination, but only over many years with the growth triggers as a safety — or so they thought.
Hosemann did not mention the snafu to senators when he presided over a brief session on Friday before they left for the weekend.
House Speaker Jason White and Ways and Means Chairman Trey Lamar, the biggest proponents of the tax overhaul also declined comment Friday. A House spokeswoman said a written statemen would be forthcoming sometime Friday.
Other Senate leaders on Friday said almost nothing about the mistake and operated as if everything were normal. They voted to invite conference on a separate Senate tax cut bill that remains alive. It would appear that bill is moot at this point.
Hosemann on Friday thanked the Senate for its hard work and “historical actions” this week.
The remarks prompted Sen. Hob Bryan, a Democrat from Amory, to cough loudly in an apparent sarcastic reference to the tax bill.
Senate Finance Chairman Josh Harkins said little about the situation other than he plans to meet with House leaders to “make it clear” what the Senate intended to do with the typo bill.
House Democrats on Friday decried the episode, both on the floor before a procedural “voice vote” to send the bill on to the governor, and at a press conference later. They said House members — including a dozen Democrats — were unaware of what the bill did with the typos just like the GOP controlled Senate was.
“I asked twice, twice, for an explanation of the triggers (before a Thursday House vote),” said Rep. Omeria Scott, D-Laurel, although she voted against the bill.
Before the voice vote, House Minority Leader Robert Johnson, D-Natchez, urged lawmakers not to send the measure on to the governor, but instead send it back for more negotiation. Democrats also unsuccessfully tried to force an actual recorded roll call of the vote.
“There’s a simple way to deal with this issue, they could have sent the bill back to conference for more work,” Johnson said. “But they chose to not give a damn and just sent it straight to the governor and roll the dice and not care what the out come is. They’re just going to go with this idea that we are goin to ‘stop taxing work.’ Well, let me tell you what, there won’t be any work to tax when you cut that much out of the budget.”
The Senate typo riddled bill was something of a rush job. It was presented in committee late Monday afternoon and quickly passed with little debate. It was voted on by the full Senate on Tuesday. In recent years, lawmakers have complained that hurried passage of bills forced by legislative leaders does not provide time to vet — or sometimes even read — bills before they are passed.
Reeves said on Friday that he will sign the bill into law.
“It’s a great day for Mississippi,” he wrote on social media.
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