Mississippi continues to cut taxes for the rich and wait for the prosperity to trickle down. But after decades of tax breaks, hundreds of thousands of Mississippians still work multiple jobs to pay rent as our schools and hospitals are starved for funding. The politicians claim these tax cuts will create new jobs—but when those jobs arrive, do they lift up everyone?
Of course not. For most Mississippians, these promises of prosperity will never materialize. Their wages will stay low, their landlord will continue to raise rents, and the cost of a doctor’s visit will continue to be unaffordable. The trickle never seems to reach the people doing the actual work.
Just look around: Mississippi is phasing out its income tax while giving sweet deals to corporations, but what do we have to show for it? Our public schools are still struggling, our hospitals are closing their doors, and some of the brightest minds coming out of our universities leave the moment they graduate. It’s the same story in every corner of our economy: the people who keep our communities running are treated as expendable while those at the top are rewarded with bonuses and tax breaks.
The vast majority of Mississippians who are in their current job fields will not leave them for these new jobs and society wouldn’t function if they did. While a doctor may know more about the human body and have decades of training, the patient would still die without the janitor who keeps the hospital clean. Yet the median janitor in Mississippi makes $23,500 a year while the median doctor makes $125,000. But the gap between the doctor and the hospital’s CEO makes that difference look small.
Jason Little, the CEO of the “nonprofit” Baptist Memorial Health Care, has yearly compensation of over $3 million dollars. The math says that Little makes sixteen times more a year than the doctors who work for him. If pay reflected effort, that would mean he’s working sixteen times harder than a doctor. I don’t buy that.
This is how our economy works: the manual laborer and the professional both work equally as hard—much harder than the CEO—yet the CEO cashes the biggest check. The people who grow our food, teach our kids and care for our sick deserve more than the leftovers.
Giving the rich more tax breaks to encourage them to bring jobs into the state is not to the advantage of the working people of Mississippi. When rural hospitals close and teachers are forced to buy their own supplies, there is no room to claim that the CEOs of massive corporations like Amazon and Walmart are who deserve our hard-earned tax dollars.
Here is the solution: stop giving breaks to these corporations and instead tax the wealthiest in society. I don’t mean the doctor—I mean the CEO. Use that money to allow people to go to school without the burden of tens of thousands of dollars of debt. Use that money to ensure access to healthcare for everyone using a single-payer healthcare system. Use that money to guarantee that teachers and nurses receive the pay they deserve and keep our young people from leaving the state in search of opportunity.
We have to elect candidates who don’t just say they’re “Mississippi First” and then take millions in corporate PAC money. We need candidates who are real people, who have faced real problems in real positions on all levels of government.
In the meantime, I encourage you to consider forming or joining a union. A union is simply demanding that your workplace operate like a democracy. It means having a voice when decisions are made that are going to affect your paycheck and your livelihood. If this were the government, would you want a single unelected boss controlling your life for eight hours a day? I wouldn’t.
If you have a job where it feels like there is no room for upward mobility, yet that corporation continues to rake in huge profits year over year, then you need to advocate for yourself alongside your fellow employees.
Do what you can now to ensure that your workplace is democratic through unionization. Do what you can at the ballot box, whether that’s running yourself or knocking doors for someone who will protect workers rights. Because if we act together, Mississippi can finally stop waiting for greatness to trickle down and start building it from the ground up.
This MFP Voices opinion essay reflects the personal opinion of its author(s). The column does not necessarily represent the views of the Mississippi Free Press, its staff or board members. To submit an opinion for the MFP Voices section, send up to 1,200 words and sources fact-checking the included information to voices@mississippifreepress.org. We welcome a wide variety of viewpoints.