Enterprise-Journal, McComb

Republicans in the Mississippi Legislature have suddenly gotten religion when it comes to raising the state’s ludicrously low tax on cigarettes.

Republican lawmakers have spent the last several years helping Gov. Haley Barbour block efforts to raise the tax, including during the recent fruitless special session. Now some GOP leaders, including Lt. Gov. Phil Bryant, are saying let us take another crack at it in yet another special session in September or October.

Bryant is an especially interesting convert.

During the off-and-on special session that dragged on from late May through early August, he refused to allow the Senate to consider the cigarette tax hike that the House leadership proposed as a way to patch up part of the Medicaid shortfall.

Now, the lieutenant governor says he thinks it would take only a day in Jackson to get lawmakers from both chambers to agree on at least the size of a tax increase, although decisions about what to do with the extra revenue would best be postponed until the next regular session begins in January.

Bryant and other Republicans have said they wanted to wait on the findings of Barbour’s tax study commission before they acted, but that has been largely a dodge. Barbour himself has let it be known for months that the commission was going to recommend raising the cigarette tax. If it didn’t, the entire study group should be laughed out of the room.

Mississippi’s 18-cents-per-pack cigarette excise tax is the third lowest in the country, a dollar below the national average. Raising it has widespread public support. Even many smokers agree with a hike. If not for Barbour’s obstinacy, it would have been done years ago.

House Speaker Billy McCoy says there’s no reason, after all the Senate’s foot-dragging on this issue, to rush back to Jackson to deal with it this fall.

Bryant, however, actually may have a good idea to pass the tax hike first, then haggle in January over what to do with it.

There are going to be a host of ideas — many of them worthwhile, some of them stinkers — about what to do with the proceeds. We can see the whole effort bogging down over how to spend the money and nothing getting enacted.

The revenue potential is only half of the motivation for raising the tax. The other is making cigarettes more expensive so that more smokers are enticed to quit and fewer young people ever start.

The sooner that disincentive kicks in, the better.

— Enterprise-Journal, McComb