Legislative roundup

Week of March 17-21, 2025

From staff reports

Well, the long-awaited tax fight ended very abruptly this week, in truly spectacular fashion. The Senate finally agreed to total elimination of the personal income tax and sent the House their tax plan early in the week. The expectation was that it would “go to conference.”

For the unfamiliar, when a bill “goes to conference,” it means that both chambers have passed it but each chamber has made amendments before passage. The chamber from which the bill originated will then “invite conference” so that selected negotiators from each chamber can fight it out over what the final version of the bill will look like. If they can’t agree, it dies. If they reach a conclusion that both chambers are happy with, they vote on the negotiated, final version of the bill one last time.

The House took up the Senate version of HB1 on Thursday morning and passed it without much fanfare. This was a fairly shocking development given the massive changes the Senate had made to the bill.

That was only the first shock of the day. As first reported by Mississippi Today, the Senate made quite the error in what they sent back to the House. While the House plan had a very specific 10-year phase-out of the income tax, the (intended) Senate plan would phase out the income tax over an undefined period of time that was dependent upon the state’s revenue hitting certain benchmarks. Unfortunately, there was a massive typo in the bill. Instead of 85 percent, the bill read .85 percent, which – as any sixth grader can tell you – is very different from 85 percent. The bill that passed the House may very well end up eliminating the personal income tax even faster than the original House bill intended.

Truly, a mess.

The bill is now on its way to the governor’s desk. Gov. Tate Reeves, a huge proponent of eliminating the personal income tax, is beyond delighted. We suspect some folks under the dome are far less delighted given the pains the Senate went through to pass what they believed to be a far more measured approach to eliminating the income tax.

Meanwhile, the rest of us are left asking how this massive cut to the general fund – $2.2 billion, to be exact – will impact basic government services like roads and bridges maintenance, public education and healthcare. And that’s not even taking the economic chaos being driven by the Trump administration into effect.

Lawmakers took Mississippi into unprecedented times this week, ensuring that it will be the first state with a personal income tax to completely eliminate it – glaring typo and all.