Jump to full article: Jackson (MS) Clarion-Ledger, 2007-03-21
Author: Sid Salter
Intro: With the final death Tuesday in the state Senate of the 2007 version of a combined tax swap bill, political reality looms both for those who supported the tax swap and for those who opposed it. The bill would have cut the state's 7 percent grocery tax in half while raising the state's 18-cent per pack cigarette excise tax to $1 a pack.
Gov. Haley Barbour and his troops in the Senate won the day and did so within the margins of the Senate rules. Any last-minute heroics by pro-tax swap forces to take the issue away from a committee chairman was doomed from the start.
The 31-20 Senate procedural vote that could have revived the twice-dead tax swap legislation is evidence that the overall issues are far from dead. Some 60 percent of the Senate supported at least voting on the tax swap measure. The measure failed by only 3 votes to attain the two-thirds majority needed for passage.
But a majority of both houses of the Legislature favors these measures or at the very least feared going home to campaign for re-election daubed with the brush of being against them.
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