Audio recording is automated for accessibility. Humans wrote and edited the story. Mississippi Today Ideas is a platform for thoughtful Mississippians to share their ideas about our state’s past, present and future. Opinions expressed in guest essays are the author’s own and do not necessarily r epresent those of Mississippi Today. You can read more about the section here.   As a Black woman who is born, raised and generationally from Mississippi, I carry the state’s history, culture and politics on my back. Both of my parents are older than the Civil Rights Act of 1965, and I am only three generations removed from the first free-born African Americans in my family. So when I became aware of a harmful federal reconciliation package that was made into law last summer, I was immediately alarmed how this law makes our beloved hospitality state hostile to the most vulnerable Mississippians. On July 4th, the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” sometimes called the “Working Families Tax Cuts Act,” became law. This law will cause Mississippians to suffer because fewer vulnerable people will be able to access important human needs programs such as Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program that provides food benefits. Katherine Jones Credit: Courtesy photo This law is highly immoral because it takes food and healthcare from the poor to give even more money to the rich. Major permanent tax cuts were given to billionaires; meanwhile, very small, temporary tax breaks on tips and overtime pay were given as breadcrumbs to working families.  These small, short-lived tax cuts are canceled out for low-income families due to the huge cuts in human needs programs. The law will cause Mississippi hospitals to lose up to $1 billion over the next decade and threatens to close or reduce services of over 400 hospitals nationwide that primarily serve Black communities. It could leave 160,000 Mississippians without care and has killed Mississippi’s Medicaid expansion proposals.  Our state’s budget is in a chokehold due to the One Big Beautiful Bill, further causing harm to Mississippians. To offset the harmful Medicaid cuts, the teacher pay raise passed by the Legislature earlier this year was slashed by thousands of dollars. Even state Rep. Karl Oliver, a  Winona Republican and key House appropriator, has admitted that the state budget is very tight. This could be a looking glass into the future. Legislation that addresses human needs is put on the backburner while our state is on the brink of a recession. That means the state’s leaders will have to accept defeat and leave the most vulnerable Mississippians with a mountain of burdens or finally make the rich and big corporations pay their fair share by raising their taxes to make our lives affordable.  I take the social and economic needs of humanity seriously, since for longer than my lifetime Mississippi has been in a state of sustained poverty. As a granddaughter of the Mississippi Delta, the blood running through my veins comes from a subregion that is especially poverty stricken. Yet, simple human needs programs meant to heal the sick and feed the hungry have continuously been villainized. In previous years the poor were labeled as “militant agitators” and today the poor are characterized as continuing “waste, fraud and abuse.” In the past and present, laws have been created to keep the disadvantaged stuck in a cycle of poverty. In 2026, that looks like paying for tax giveaways to the wealthy by cutting the lifeline of the poor. In reverence to Civil Rights activist, organizer and my fellow Mississippian Fannie Lou Hamer, I’m still sick, I’m still tired, but my God I am far from done. I refuse to be satisfied living in a world where any Mississippian is pushed into a crisis because of man-made traps done to benefit the wealthy few. We need laws and legislators that are rooted in the principles of care instead of greed. Partisanship aside, I urge Mississippi to choose a land of the living for I know we can change. Katherine Jones, a Brandon native, currently lives in Washington, D.C., where she works for the national nonprofit Public Citizen as a tax organizer, doing accountability work for the federal One Big Beautiful Bill. She continues to have a deep love for her hometown of Brandon. ...read more read less