House Bill 1439, authored by Speaker Phillip Gunn, purports to eliminate the income tax and stimulate the economy. Still, it dramatically increases taxes in at least 28 other areas, including agricultural equipment, automobile sales, manufacturing machinery and a sizable across-the-board sales tax increase on all items.
The COVID-19 pandemic upended our lives and presented new challenges to leaders around the world in 2020. Using this timeline tool, you can explore how the worst public-health crisis in a century unfolded in Mississippi, examine how state, local and public-health leaders responded, and retrace the spread of the novel coronavirus alongside the various policies they enacted.
Two wealthy Mississippi political donors “conspired” to “fraudulently” obtain more than $2 million in public education funds and used it to pay for teachers’ salaries at their private school in Jackson, federal prosecutors allege.
All Mississippians aged 16 or older are eligible for a COVID-19 vaccine starting the morning of March 16. The expansion in eligibility comes well ahead
What does it mean to be without water? It is innumerable small humiliations: the splash of a toilet flushed with a bucket, days on end without a shower, no clean clothes. It is weeks without a cooked meal, a sink full of unclean dishes, brushing one’s teeth with water from a bottle, if a bottle can be found. For Tamiko and Otis Smith and many others, it is something far more dangerous.
Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves says he still opposes expanding Medicaid in Mississippi even though the federal government is offering to give the state an extra $600 million to do so over a two-year period.
LGBTQ rights advocates say that Gov. Tate Reeves put transgender teen and young adult lives “in danger” today by signing Senate Bill 2536, “The Mississippi Fairness Act,” banning transgender students at public schools and colleges from participating in sports teams that match their gender.
Members of the Mississippi clergy invoked the tradition of solidarity and acknowledged the still-unfinished work when they hosted a press conference in conjunction with Working Together Mississippi to unveil a letter expressing their discontent with the Mississippi Legislature’s seven-year inaction regarding Medicaid expansion. The letter also endorses the Mississippi Cares plan, a version of Medicaid reform initiated by the Mississippi Hospital Association that is intended to provide health-care coverage for working-class Mississippians who currently fall into the “gap” between traditional Medicaid coverage and private health-care plans.
Jackson Mayor Chokwe A. Lumumba and Lt. Gov Delbert Hosemann met today at the Capitol for a “respectful conversation,” in the mayor’s words, to discuss a concrete plan to address Jackson’s short-term water-system needs. The meeting was a preface to the much more complex discussion of how to permanently address the city’s aging water infrastructure.
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