William Perkins, Jr., editor of the Mississippi Baptist Record, has an interesting take on Mississippi's tax burden, on which I commented in a previous post. According to his editorial comment in the 10/16/03 edition:
California is not the only place in the country where taxes are too high and government is too unresponsive. [One wonders how a government gets to be unresponsive enough.] The people of Mississippi labor under an enormous tax burden imposed by politicians who promised us a few short years ago that legalized gambling would make our economy the envy of the nation. It hasn't. Long before that, politicians promised us the same economic benefits from legalized liquor. We're still waiting.
I actually think he has something of a point about legalized gambling, which is a big industry in Mississippi. It's actual net economic benefits are arguable.
The part about legalized liquor needs some explanation. It was only in the 1960s, as I recall, that the sale of liquor and beer was legalized in the state. But it's local option, still. There are individual counties that are still "dry counties," i.e., liquor and beer can't be legally sold there. For many years, it was said, a coalition of Baptist preachers and bootleggers kept alcohol illegal in the state.
One thing that's always seemed bizarre to me is that the State of Mississippi actually collected a tax on the illegal liquor sold there. It was called the "black market tax." How do you collect a tax on an illegal activity? I've never figured out how they did that.
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