Budgets and taxes

The Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, 1/4/8

Legislators resuming their annual, unenviable struggles with taxes and budgets next week in the 2008 session face official forecasts of a diminished rate of growth in revenues – which could prove problematic.

Gov. Barbour vetoed during his first term a bipartisan “tax swap” – reductions in Mississippi’s highest-in-the-nation 7 percent sales tax on food, linked to a raise from 18 cents per pack on cigarettes (third lowest) to 93 cents, still below the national average ($1.11).

Nationwide, 31 states don’t tax groceries.