The new tax cut and Jobs Act adds section 1061 to the Code, addressing the taxation of “applicable partnership interests.” Under the provision, if one or more “applicable partnership interests” were held by a taxpayer at any time during the tax year, some portion of the taxpayer’s long-term capital gain with respect to those interests may be treated as short ...

End-of-the year revenue collections suggest Mississippi’s lawmakers could have a little extra money to spend when they return for their election-year session in January 2019. Preliminary numbers released by the Legislative Budget Office show that thanks to strong May and June collections, the state’s General Fund ended $88 million over the level that budget writers had estimated back in the ...

Rural poverty skyrockets as jobs move away,” read a headline on TheHill.com.  “The number of rural Americans living in poverty has skyrocketed in recent years amidst an economic evolution that has cost hundreds of thousands of manufacturing and mining jobs.”    The problem is twofold, the article says – key employers in rural areas have shut down or moved away and educated ...

This is as much a book review as an art exhibit review. We took in the exhibit at the Mississippi Museum of Art on July 6, two days before it closed after it had been up since Dec. 9, 2017. Copies of the coffee-table book published by the museum to go with “Picturing Mississippi 1817-2017: Land of Plenty, Pain and ...

The United States and other world economies have experienced a profound shift over the last century and a half, transitioning from agrarian based economies in the mid-1800s to highly industrialized economies in the latter part of the 1880s and into the early 1900s. For the first half of the Twentieth Century, United States manufacturing dominated the world.  It was United ...

In Part I we looked at how John Naisbitt’s predictions in his 1982 book, “Megatrends,” had played out in Jackson, Mississippi. In this column we will look at his 10 predictions in the context of the broader society. Each prediction or forecast or direction, whichever you like to label them, is listed followed by a brief commentary on what happened. ...

Here we go again. PERS is bumping employer contribution rates, again, to try and keep the retirement system actuarially sound. The Associated Press reported it will cost taxpayers an extra $100 million annually to do so.   In 2011, Gov. Haley Barbour established his PERS Study Commission to look for ways to stabilize PERS and keep it solvent. At the ...

Howard Sherman was already wondering why Mississippi Democrats seemed so unreceptive to his message before his runoff loss Tuesday. “I’m battling ‘What’s the point?’ a lot,” Sherman told The Associated Press six days before state House minority leader David Baria beat him soundly for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate. “There seems to be a very entrenched interest in not ...

There is nothing new or novel about generating unique content as a complement to an organization’s overall marketing strategy.  In fact, as early as 1732, Benjamin Franklin began publishing Poor Richard’s Almanac as a means to promote his printing business.  In 1895, John Deere launched The Furrow, an agricultural magazine that is still published today. The 1900s brought an uptick ...

The Supreme Court in South Dakota v. Wayfair last week reversed a half century of its precedent and ruled that a physical presence is no longer necessary for states to require remote sellers to collect sales or use tax on interstate sales of goods.  Time will tell whether or to what extent Mississippi will experience the tax windfall predicted by ...