Louisiana passed income tax cuts
Louisiana passes income tax cuts, sales tax to increase
Gov. Jeff Landry scored one of the biggest victories of his political career Friday when he managed to push major corporate and personal income tax cuts through the Louisiana Legislature, apparently without leaving the state chronically underfunded.
“I didn’t get a big win, the state of Louisiana got a big win,” Landry said in an interview Friday at the close of a 13-day special session.
But the governor’s tax reductions come at the expense of moving Louisiana’s highest-in-the-nation average sales tax to an even higher rate that will disproportionately burden poor people. It will also apply to a new list of digital products.
“The last-minute decision to increase the state sales tax from 4.45% to 5% was made in closed-door negotiations, without any opportunity for public testimony and without an analysis of the bill’s impact on state revenues and on people at different income levels,” said Jan Moller, executive director of Invest in Louisiana, a policy group that advocates for the interests of moderate and low-income people.
Politics and Business roundup compiled by Pluribus News
DEMOCRATS: Michigan Sen. Mallory McMorrow (D) is considering running to chair the Democratic National Committee. She would join a growing field of candidates that includes former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley (D) and the chairs of the Minnesota and Wisconsin parties. (MLive)
TEXAS: The Texas Supreme Court ruled Friday that Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) did not have to testify in a whistleblower lawsuit at the heart of the impeachment charges brought against him last year. The court ruled that Paxton’s testimony could be improperly used for legislative purposes. (Associated Press, Texas Tribune)
LEADERSHIP: Iowa Senate Democrats have chosen Sen. Janice Weiner (D) as their new minority leader. Weiner takes over for Sen. Pam Jochum (D), who is retiring after 30 years in the legislature. (Des Moines Register) Nevada Republicans have elected Assemb. Gregory Hafen (R) to serve as caucus leader. (Las Vegas Review-Journal)
App offers Denver youth an opportunity to report concerns
Seventeen-year-old EJ Dawson doesn’t always know where his next meal is coming from – a problem he used to try to solve on his own to avoid feeling judged. Now, he uses Power of One, a new app available to youth in northeast Denver to report a range of challenges, including food insecurity and violence.
“I’ve used the app a couple of times,” Dawson said. “I have suggested the app to my entire family, and from what I’ve gotten back, it really helps them to be able to express how they feel without knowing the person…. They know that they have other people that are anonymous that they can talk to who won’t judge or point fingers, but just are willing to help.”
South Carolina to pursue Medicaid work requirements for some recipients
Trevor Hawkins, an attorney at Legal Aid of Arkansas, remembers how busy his job was while the state imposed work-or-school requirements on Medicaid recipients: His office was swamped with frantic phone calls from people who said they couldn’t comply with the new rule because they weren’t healthy enough to work or had to care for sick relatives.
“A whole heap of folks, after a month or two, started getting notices saying, ‘Hey, you’re out of compliance, and you’re going to lose your coverage,’” Hawkins told Stateline. For many people, he said, keeping their coverage was “absolutely vital to maintaining their health or getting better so they might work again.”
In June 2018, Arkansas became the first state to require some Medicaid recipients to work, volunteer, go to school or participate in job training to receive benefits. By the time a federal judge halted the policy in April 2019, 18,000 adults had lost coverage.
Arkansas was one of 13 states, including South Carolina, that received permission to impose work rules on at least some Medicaid recipients during the last Trump administration. Due to the pandemic, South Carolina’s approved rules were never implemented.
Nine additional states requested permission to enact Medicaid work requirements during Trump’s term but had not won approval by the time it ended.
When the Biden administration came into office, it rescinded all the approvals. But now that Trump is coming back, many of those states will try again — and they’ll have a supportive U.S. Congress in their corner.
— South Carolina Daily Gazette
Flint to receive $8.7M to expand fleet of fuel cell buses
FLINT, MI — Flint’s Mass Transportation Authority will receive $8.7 million to help add to its fleet of fuel-cell buses and to expand its hydrogen production facility.
Gov. Gretchen Whitmer announced the investment and others tied to a clean hydrogen hub project in a news release on Wednesday, Nov. 20 , saying the Michigan-backed Midwest Alliance for Clean Hydrogen (MachH2) has received a total of $22.2 million from the U.S. Department of Energy .
The total estimated cost for the Flint MTA project is $11.6 million. The agency is in line to receive $8.7 million — $5.8 million in federal investment and $2.9 million from the Michigan Department of Transportation — with MTA responsible for raising the final $2.9 million.
Helene was one of multiple catastrophes that plagued North Carolina farmers
Tropical Storm Helene terrorized Western North Carolina’s farms in late September. Recovering is no easy task. And Helene was the not the first calamity that farmers across the state faced in 2024.
Observations about what’s happened are bringing out strong words from the state’s farming experts.
“The land is just physically not there anymore,” said Luke Owen, a Buncombe County extension agent.
“Generations of wealth were swept away,” said Lynn Gibbard, co-director of Appalachian State University’s Frontline to Farms Initiative.
“This is the worst agricultural year we have had in North Carolina history,” said Mike Yoder, the associate director of the College and Agriculture and Life Sciences at N.C. State University.
Farms tend to be located in the region’s fertile river bottoms, and when those rivers swelled and roared, they took crops, barns, bails of hay, miles of fencing, farm roads, cattle, farm equipment and acres of topsoil.
Higher-elevation farms dealt with landslides and high winds. Loss of refrigeration took out stores of meat and dairy products. Some farmers are dealing with the possibility that they might not be able to recover their farms at all.
One farmer in Boone, Brittany Robinson, owner of Four Winds Farm, lost her life in a landslide. She was a staple of Western North Carolina’s farm community who dedicated her life to feeding the community, according to her Watauga County peers.
The mountains are not the only region of the state with serious agricultural concerns.
State news compiled by MultiState- California – Lawmakers in Sacramento breathed a sigh of relief last week with the release of new budget projections showing a mere $2 billion deficit next year. While not insignificant, the figure is a far cry from the $68 billion shortfall the Legislative Analyst's Office projected last year, which Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) disputed at the time and claimed was really only $38 billion in the red. However, the LAO also projects a $30 billion deficit for FY 2028-29. Read more.
- Florida – New House Speaker Daniel Perez reiterated last week that the legislature will not hold a special session to address condo fees, despite end-of-year deadlines under a new state law causing fees to go up. Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) for weeks had been urging lawmakers to resolve the issue in special session this fall, but now appears to have agreed that the issue can wait until the regular session next March, and in the meantime, the governor can direct regulators to ease up on enforcement. Read more.
- Georgia – Gov. Brian Kemp was selected by fellow GOP governors to chair the Republican Governors Association. Kemp replaces Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee as head of the group, which selects a new chair annually. Kemp had been serving as RGA vice chair, and his promotion to chair the influential group is thought to boost his profile ahead of a potential Senate run to unseat U.S. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) in 2026. Read more.
- North Carolina – Republican supermajorities overrode Gov. Roy Cooper's (D) veto of HB 10, a high-profile immigration enforcement and school voucher funding bill, as the House and Senate reconvened for two days last week. GOP lawmakers also flexed their partisan muscles to pass SB 382, which provides $227 million for much-needed hurricane relief, but also includes a multitude of unrelated provisions reducing the powers and authority of the incoming governor, lieutenant governor, and AG, all Democrats, shifting those powers to the incoming Republican state auditor and the GOP-dominated General Assembly. Lawmakers also scheduled a return to session Dec. 2-13. Read more.
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