Organize the South

From the New York Times, it gives a sense of conservative attitudes to taxes. Here's the short version: taxes are a vehicle used to take the money from those with lesser income and give to corporations. Note: All links from this point on are from the New York Times.


Powerful Governor Stands His Ground, Again, on Food Tax
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/07/us/07groceries.html?ex=1330923600&en=755b2d8000d33630&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss
By ADAM NOSSITER
Published: March 7, 2007

JACKSON, Miss., March 1 — The shoppers at the no-frills Brookshire’s supermarket — plate lunches $4.49, food stamps gladly accepted — have no doubt: swapping the nation’s highest state grocery tax for one of its lowest cigarette taxes is an excellent idea, and fie on the governor who opposes it.

“Oh, yeah, no doubt about it, they need to put it off the food,” said Reggie Funchess, a worker at the BASF plant. “It’s something that will help the people. Politicians, they must have a treasure chest somewhere.”

Up at the stately domed Mississippi Capitol, Gov. Haley Barbour, a former tobacco lobbyist, has other ideas. Studies, polls, protests at the Capitol, legislative sentiment and America’s highest cardiovascular disease rate notwithstanding, the governor of the poorest state is not budging, for the second year in a row: no cut in the 7 percent grocery tax and no increase in the 18-cents-a-pack third-lowest-in-the-nation, cigarette tax.

Mr. Barbour, the former Republican National Committee chairman and big-time Washington lobbyist whose clients included the five major tobacco companies, is a busy man these days, and a powerful governor.

Basking at home in the reflection of his national image as the post-Hurricane Katrina success story among governors, having last week scored a giant automobile plant for his state and considered a shoo-in for re-election this year, Mr. Barbour faces few opponents, legislators say. He pushed through the Legislature hundreds of millions in subsidies for the plant, for Toyota S.U.V.s, three days after announcing it.

Mr. Barbour, the lawmakers say, is getting used to getting his way and is likely to do so on the doomed groceries-for-cigarettes tax swap.

“Can we talk about it some other time?” the governor asked as he bustled down a marble corridor to an appointment and as an aide cut in that “the governor wasn’t going to be able to talk about this today.”

And so it is that a bill to increase the cigarette tax to $1 a pack and cut the grocery tax in half overwhelmingly passed in the Mississippi House last month, remains bottled up in the State Senate Finance Committee, which is friendly to Mr. Barbour. Other poor states — Arkansas, South Carolina and Utah — have moved to cut their sales taxes on groceries. Not Mississippi.

“There’s no doubt he would veto this bill,” said the committee chairman, State Senator Tommy Robertson, a Republican. And he could do so without fearing an override, Mr. Robertson said.

That, to some, is a true measure of Mr. Barbour’s power. He need not worry about political fallout from rejecting what is, in most reckonings, a popular initiative.

“It’s an indication of how much influence he has, because he can take something we know is good — the best bill passed in the Legislature in the last 30 years — and he can say it’s bad,” said State Representative Percy W. Watson, the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee and a Democrat. “Politics has entered the process, and there is some effort to protect the tobacco companies.”

Another Democrat, State Senator Hob Bryan, added, “It would have been the law already were it not for the governor’s absolute determination not to raise the tax on tobacco.”

The governor’s aides and allies say Mr. Barbour is simply sticking to his no-new-taxes promise. “The governor ran four years ago on, ‘I’m not going to raise anybody’s taxes,’ and he hasn’t,” Mr. Robertson said.

But others, including health officials, say the dichotomy is false. The governor’s no-tax pledge, they insist, is at odds with the public good, since most studies show that increasing the cost of cigarettes sharply diminishes the number of smokers.

“We have the worst health indices in almost every category of any state in the country,” said Dr. J. Edward Hill, the immediate past president of the American Medical Association and a physician in Tupelo. “Reducing the percentage of citizens who smoke and increasing funding from cigarettes would have tremendous advantages.”

Dr. Hill said the issue had become entangled in political ideology. “It’s political so-called principle — ‘I’m never going to raise taxes on anything’ — which is actually also relatively stupid,” Dr. Hill said.

Mississippi is the fourth-highest state in deaths attributed to smoking. And it is one of three states that give no grocery-tax break to lower-income families, according to a study by the John C. Stennis Institute of Government at the Mississippi State University.

In the Brookshire’s parking lot, in working-class southern Jackson, shoppers toting their few bags had no trouble coming up with uses for the extra hundreds of dollars from a tax cut. Most of the buying around here is done on the first of the month — payday, explained a store official, and expenditures are made frugally.

“My children’s needs, household stuff,” said Shameka Bouie, a mother of four whose truck driver cigarette-smoking husband is “always complaining” that his habit is more expensive outside Mississippi.

Howard McBound, a police officer with the Veterans Affairs Department, said: “Groceries are what we live on. My light bill is going up. My gas bill is going up. You can raise the price of cigarettes, people will still smoke.”

Even some conservative Republicans disagree with Mr. Barbour. “The cigarette tax and the grocery tax are both public health issues,” said one, State Senator Alan Nunnelee. And the tax on groceries, Mr. Nunnelee said, “is just the most cruel tax any government can impose.”