Mississippi has spent a lot of time in recent years reducing its income tax, to the point of eliminating it during the next decade if the state economy and the state budget cooperate.
Advocates contend this will make Mississippi more competitive with other states, specifically Texas, Florida and Tennessee, that do not tax their residents’ income, and would give more people an incentive to consider living here.
But a recent column on the Mississippi Today website makes a good point in the opposite direction. It questions the wisdom of raising revenue by applying a 7% sales tax to the cost of an essential product — raising revenue “not from a luxury purchase, not from an optional indulgence, but from diapers.”
The writer, Chelesa Presley, is executive director of the Diaper Bank of the Delta, which works to assist families facing economic hardship. She noted that the Legislature has reduced the sales tax on groceries from 7% to 5%, and asks why the same reduction has not been made for diapers.
“Someone needs to ask the obvious question. If Mississippi has acknowledged that taxing what families need to survive is wrong — if we moved, however incrementally, on food — why are we still taxing diapers?” Presley wrote. “A diaper is not a luxury. A baby does not wait. The logic that justified grocery tax relief applies with equal, if not greater, force to infant necessities.”
Presley estimated a child will use 2,500 diapers during the first year, and a 7% sales tax on them adds another $70 to $100 to the cost. That excludes the cost of clothing, baby wipes, formula and other expenses of caring for a newborn.
Many families are able to pay the sales tax on these essentials without feeling it. But not everyone.
“For a family earning $25,000 a year, that is not a rounding error,” Presley wrote. “That is a week of groceries that are now taxed at a slightly lower rate while the diapers those same families purchase are not.”
State leaders have made their decision on taxes. They want to get rid of the income tax and count on the sales tax to produce more revenue. It’s a politically popular position — few voters will object to lower taxes every April.
But the flip side is that sales taxes have a greater impact on lower-income families. They take away a larger percentage of income from people in the bottom half of the earnings scale.
One solution to this would be to reduce the sales taxes that you pay by spending less money. That’s sensible until you think about the specifics of what shouldn’t be bought.
If you’re talking about options like an extra pair of shoes or a new phone, then yes, people need to understand the difference between something they want and something they need.
But families must eat to live. Lawmakers recognized this and reduced the sales tax on groceries. In the same way, babies need diapers, though purists can argue that if the commonly used garments are too expensive, a family has the option of switching to reusable cloth diapers — which would remove a hefty sales tax burden.
Presley’s argument for a reduced or, preferably, an eliminated sales tax on diapers is a good one. She noted that 24 states and the District of Columbia have taken this step, seeing that “taxing infant necessities is an indefensible policy that is fiscally negligible to the state and materially significant to families.”
At a minimum, it would be proper for the Legislature in 2027 to consider reducing the sales tax on this necessary product to 5%, the same rate applied to groceries.
— Jack Ryan, McComb Enterprise-Journal
