FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

(Jackson, MS) Mississippi Center for Public Policy Named Finalist for National Bob Williams Award

The Mississippi Center for Public Policy (MCPP) has been selected as a finalist for the prestigious Bob Williams Award for Outstanding Policy Achievement in the “Biggest Home State Win” category.

This national recognition, awarded by the State Policy Network, honors MCPP’s pivotal role in successfully advocating for the elimination of Mississippi’s income tax.

“We are deeply honored to be named a finalist for this distinguished award, jointly with Empower Mississippi,” said Douglas Carswell, President and CEO of MCPP.  “Our team led the charge for income tax reduction and eventual elimination through innovative tax triggers, and it’s incredibly rewarding to see our vision become law with the passage of HB1.”

The incremental reduction of the income tax, which started a couple of years ago, is already driving economic growth, attracting significant investment, and enhancing Mississippi’s competitiveness.

“This reform is a major victory for every Mississippi taxpayer,” Carswell added.

The winner will be determined by a vote of those attending the State Policy Network’s 33rd Annual Meeting in New Orleans in late August.

MCPP has a proven track record of transforming policy ideas into impactful legislation.  In addition to income tax elimination, recent successes include school funding reform, red tape reduction, labor market reforms, and legislation to tackle DEI ideology.

For media inquiries, please reach out to Anika Page, [email protected].

What a result!  Trump has bounced back to win the White House, gaining a majority of the popular vote for the Republicans for the first time in 20 years.  The Republicans also won the Senate and held the House, meaning that they have a mandate, and the means to deliver it, in a way they have not had for a generation.

If the incoming administration is going to turn America around, they urgently need to get to grips with the three existential challenges the US faces, namely soaring debt, mass immigration and a debilitating lack of & self-belief.

Every hundred days the US national debt is rising by $1,000,000,000,000. US national debt is already relatively higher than it was at the end of the Second World War – and this year, we will pay more on the interest to service the national debt than we do on defense. As Elon Musk, now one of Trump’s inner circle, says, unless this changes, debt will destroy America the way it did other great powers.
 
Trump needs to take an axe, the way Argentina’s President Milei has, and close many of the 400 federal agencies, starting with the Departments of Education. Certain welfare programs need to go, too. 

When Musk bought Twitter / X, he fired 80 percent of the staff, and output rose. Let’s hope he is allowed to do something similar to the federal bureaucracy. Musk, who recently complained that it takes him longer to get permission to launch a rocket than it takes his team to build it, understands how red tape is stifling America. Dramatically removing red tape, and legally sanctioning federal agencies that overreach their actual mandates, would raise economic growth.
 
Faster growth and reduced federal spending would, in time, close the deficit. Over the past four years, 10 million immigrants have entered America – me being one of them.  But the number entering illegally has soared. Set aside the unfairness of allowing in people that don’t abide by the rules the rest of us are required to follow, it is not a good idea for America to accept large numbers of people from culturally incompatible countries. See Europe for details.
 
As a new arrival, I constantly marvel at how fortunate I am to live in America. But it bothers me that many Americans don’t see how awesome their country is.

Too many Americans – especially young Americans – have been taught to despise their own country by smart-stupid liberals in the education system who think that self-loathing is a mark of sophistication, when in reality it betrays a lack of it. The ‘woke’ insanity in the classroom needs to stop. 
 
Trump has already indicated he will abolish federal Diversity, Equity & Inclusion programs on day one.  He will be President as America celebrates her 250^th birthday on July 4^th, 2026.  Trump needs to ensure it becomes a celebration of all that is good and admirable about this country, and not a woke-fest.

The only certain way to take back control of the education system from smart-stupid liberals is through school choice. 

In many states like our own Mississippi, a coalition of liberal activists, like the so-called Parents’ Campaign, and anti-school choice Republicans, such as Lieutenant Governor Delbert Hosemann, have come together to block school choice.

Trump has made it clear he intends to address this, and Trump has indicated he will push for a federal law to give families school choice through a tax credit. 
 
Trump is the most pro school choice President in the history of America, and I doubt Team Trump will take kindly to any anti school choice Republicans who carry on opposing public to public school choice and tax credits. State legislation on school choice in the 2025 session is likely to be closely watched by Team Trump. 

Any anti school choice Republicans from Mississippi going to Mar-a-Lago to try to solicit Trump endorsements are likely to be disappointed.  Their future trips are as likely to be as unsuccessful in that regard as their previous ones.  Like last time, I very much doubt President Trump will offer anti school choice wannabes so much as a photo opportunity if they continue to oppose public to public school choice. 
 
If you live in Mississippi, you will shortly have a Republican President in the White House, and a Republican Congress and Supreme Court in Washington DC. You, of course, already live in a state run by a Republican Governor, under a Republican-run legislature.  If we can’t deliver conservative policy now, then when? 

Now is the time for Mississippi – and America – to use this opportunity and place the country on an authentically conservative path.

America faces an axis of aggression.  China, Russia, Iran and North Korea are not only actively undermining US interests.  They increasingly seem to be working together.
 
How should America respond?
 
According to a new report published by Mississippi Senator, Roger Wicker, America needs a new national defense strategy capable of responding to this “emerging axis of aggressors”. “21^st Century Peace Through Strength: a generational investment in the US military” offers a serious analysis of US military capabilities and makes some important recommendations.

Wicker calls for an immediate $55 billion increase in military spending in 2025, on top of the almost $900 billion existing budget.  The aim, he suggests, should be for the United States to spend around 5 percent of GDP on defense.
 
To put that in context, America today spends 3.4 GDP percent on defense, and has not spent more than 5 percent since Ronald Reagan was in the White House.  Reagan famously won the Cold War, facing down the Soviet threat by beefing up American strength.  Wicker envisions a similar approach in “Peace through Strength”.
 
What is really interesting about Wicker’s proposal is not the call for more money for the military, but his suggestion that there should be a “dramatic increase in competition in the defense industrial base”.  Senator Wicker is right.  Often, we think of applying free market principles to education or healthcare.  There is a very powerful argument for applying free market discipline to defense spending, too.
 
With the national debt growing, it is vital that America gets the maximum bang for every defense buck.  Wicker puts forward ideas as to how to make this happen through far reaching “acquisition reform”. Allowing more market competition in the defense sector would help ensure that America avoided the sorry fate of my own native Britain.
 
The UK spends about $70 billion a year on defense.  That might be less than a tenth of what America spends, but it still means that the UK has the sixth largest defense budget in the world, above Japan and roughly on a parr with Russia.
 
Unfortunately, Britain has not been effective at converting what she is able to spend on defense into military muscle.  Despite spending all that money, British aircraft carriers seldom seem to carry many aircraft.  Indeed, the expensive new carriers don’t always seem to be able to spend much time at sea.  The less said about British tanks the better. 
 
UK defense acquisition has been a series of costly disasters because the defense budget is often spent in the interests of various favored suppliers, rather than the military.
 
I first became aware of quite how bad British defense acquisition was on a visit to Afghanistan as a Member of the British Parliament.  Troops in Helmand complained about a shortage of helicopters, yet I noticed rows of American Black Hawk helicopters on the runway back in Kandahar.

Why, I wanted to know, didn’t we Brits just buy Black Hawks from the American company that made them?  I soon discovered that British defense acquisition is viewed by some as a giant job creation scheme.  Or else it is about filling the order books of well-connected companies, not giving the military what they need.
 
America needs acquisition reform to avoid defense dollars being spent by various vested interests, rather than on the best interests of the US military. Some will say that America cannot afford to increase defense spending.  I worry that America cannot afford not to.
 
Years of federal deficits mean than the US national debt is soaring.  There will be enormous pressures on federal spending.  All the more reason to ensure that the US gets maximum value for every defense dollar.
 
Let’s hope Wicker’s reforms are acted upon whoever is in the White House.

So often politics focuses on trivia.  What Wicker has done is produce a serious study to address important geo political questions that the United States is going to have to deal with. 

Putting America first does not mean ignoring what is happening on the other side of the world.  Merely wishing away anything outside the Western hemisphere does not make the United States more secure.  It ultimately means that the world’s problems will show up at the US border.

Putting America first means investing in defense.  Wicker shows how we might do that.

A school choice revolution is sweeping America.  Mississippi is now sandwiched on either side by states that give families control over their child’s share of state education dollars.

In Arkansas and Alabama, the state government will pay between $7,000 - $9,000 into a dedicated Education Savings Account for each individual child.  Mom & dad will then be able to allocate that money to a school that best meets the needs of their child. 

Almost of dozen states have done something similar, but not Mississippi.  Why?

Despite having a solid Republican majority for over a decade, Mississippi has made ridiculously little progress towards school choice.

Right now our state has a total of nine Charter Schools, less than 0.8 percent of the total, and fewer than one might find in a single suburb of New Orleans.  Our school choice program for Special Needs students has hardly grown at all. 

According to one of the leading figures of the school choice movement, Corey DeAngelis, whose new book “The Parent Revolution” has just been released, COVID lockdowns were the great catalyst for change in other states. 

Before COVID, many parents meekly assumed that education meant sending their kids to whichever government school people in their zip code were assigned.  Along came the lockdowns, and millions of Americans got to see how many government schools are run in the interests of teacher unions and school board bureaucrats, rather than their kids. 

Teacher Unions were quick to call for schools to be closed, and fought to keep things that way.  They attacked suggestions schools reopen as “rooted in sexism, racism and misogyny”.  The vice president of the Chicago Teacher Union attacked proposals to return to in-person teaching - while on vacation in Puerto Rico!  

So why didn’t COVID lockdowns help shake things up in our state?  Lots of government schools in Mississippi were closed for extended periods.  How come that not led to more pressure for school choice in the Magnolia state? 

The biggest barrier to change in our state is that fact that not enough of our elected politicians see the need for change.  Many prefer to believe that standards in government schools are better than they are, and if things aren’t bad, they reason, why change? 

Advocates for school choice need to be prepared to present some uncomfortable facts about education standards in our state:

• 2 in 3 fourth graders in Mississippi government schools fail to achieve proficiency in reading.  According to National Assessment of Educational Progress data only 31 percent of fourth graders were at or above reading proficiency in 2022.
• Almost 4 in 10 fourth graders in 2022 did not even reach the basic reading standard.
• 2 in 3 fourth graders in Mississippi government schools fail to achieve proficiency in math, with only 32 percent at or above proficiency in 2022. 
• At eighth grade, 8 in 10 were failing to achieve math proficiency in 2022. 
• Almost one in four Mississippi students – 108,000 children – are chronically absent from school.  Mississippi Department of Education data shows that in 2022-23 the chronic absentee rate from Mississippi government schools was 23.8 percent.
• The chronic absentee rate is way above the national average and has skyrocketed from 70,275 in 2016 – 17 to 108,310 in 2022-23.  
  
  

If you want to young Mississippians to get a better start in life than this, you need to support fully fledged school choice. 

School choice advocacy organizations, like MCPP, have often made the case for change in terms of social justice.  School choice, we like to say, would give every American child opportunities that today only rich families have.  This isn’t enough.

Nor is it enough to keep publishing white papers nobody reads and drafting legislation that never gets passed. 

We need to demonstrate that school choice is the only effective response to the ‘woke’ takeover of government-run classrooms by the ideological left.

Many government schools in America have clearly been promoting Critical Race Theory, an off shoot of Marxist academic theory.  Often this has been done innocuously, under the banner of promoting equity, diversity or inclusion. 
 
Sometimes the mask slips.  We know, for example, that here in Republican-run Mississippi, our own Department of Education has recommended that teachers use social studies resources calling for the abolition of Christopher Columbus Day and the payment of racial reparations.  
 

There are no shortage of vested interests - teacher unions, education bureaucrats, federal officials - determined to do everything they can to keep your kids captive in government-run classrooms.

To overcome that opposition, we must first address the anti-school choice politicians who indulge them. 
 
In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbot was a fully-throated champion of universal education savings accounts.  He threw his weight behind change, only to have a dozen or so “conservative” members of the legislature scupper the plan.
 
When Texas voters saw those anti-school choice “Republicans” vote to deny them school choice, they helped make these “Republican” lawmakers ex-lawmakers.  School choice, I suspect, will sail through the Texas legislature in the next session. 

Either you are a conservative and support school choice, or you aren’t. 

MCPP President and CEO, Douglas Carswell, had the opportunity to speak at the Winona Rotary Club this past Friday.

Detailing MCPP's post-session plans, Douglas discussed our initiatives to combat DEI in our state universities, uncover the disincentives that welfare poses against full-time employment, and the newly passed Mississippi Student Funding Formula.

House Speaker, Jason White, addressed a packed lunch time meeting hosted by the Mississippi Center for Public Policy in Jackson.

Speaker White talked about what had been accomplished during his first session as House Speaker, and shared his priorities for the future.

Notably, under Speaker White’s leadership the House:

• Authored and achieved historic school funding reform so that Mississippi will now fund students, not a system.
• Voted to restore the ballot initiative process.
• Voted to overhaul Certificate of Need laws that intentionally restrict the number of healthcare providers.
• Voted for the SAFER Act to protect women’s spaces. 

The Senate might have subsequently blocked the restoration of the ballot initiative and Certificate of Need reform, but both school funding reform and the SAFER Act have since passed into law.

“There was enormous interest in what Speaker White had to say” said Douglas Carswell, MCPP CEO.  “Rather than skating over subjects, the Speaker went into tremendous detail.”

“While praising public schools, Speaker White talked about the need to allow money to follow the student within the public school system.”

“He also talked about Certificate of Need laws and the need to review the impact of such laws of restricting access to health care in certain areas.”

“MCPP loves hosting conservatives, and there was real warmth towards Speaker White and what he had to say.”

Many university degrees produce a negative return on investment, according to a report out this week.  Data from the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity shows that the cost of many college degrees is not offset by increases in lifetime earnings.

This prompted me to take a look at some separate Mississippi-specific data from the State Workforce Investment Board on graduate earnings.  I discovered an extraordinary variance in the future earning potential of different degrees. 

Here are the earning averages for fifteen different degree types for Mississippi public universities:

So what?  Demand for engineers and insurance professionals is far greater than for actors and anthropologists.  Some degrees require more rigor than others.

But then I took a look at data on what happens to Mississippi high schoolers.  Approximately 6 in 10 of those that do complete public high school in Mississippi fail to either start any form of college education, or start but fail to complete any kind of college education.

Of those public high school graduates that do go into any kind of post-secondary education, about 1 in 3 drop out. 

Pointing out awkward facts about education in Mississippi can be a sensitive subject.  Much has been said about the relative improvements in Mississippi’s reading and writing scores in recent years.  To be fair, our state is no longer 49^th out of 50, but 30-something-or-other.

Great, but the data also shows that only 31 percent of 4^th graders were at or above proficiency in reading in 2022.  In other words, more than two in three Mississippi 4^th graders were not proficient in reading.

The data also shows that a mere 32 percent of 4^th graders were at or above math proficiency in 2022.  Forgive me if I don’t rush to celebrate a system that fails to produce proficiency for two thirds of public school 4^th graders. 

In the worst school districts, a student has the odds of achieving proficiency overwhelmingly stacked against them.  But even in the best performing school districts – the ones they keep telling us are good – nearly 4 in 10 students are not proficient. 

These are the hard facts about public education in our state, and facts do not care about politicians’ feelings.  Neither should you if you want to improve the life chances of young people in our state.

Poor proficiency rates in primary education help explain why one in three public high school graduates are dropping out of college education later on.

The underperformance of our education system helps explain the low rate of workforce participation in our state.  Unless we acknowledge the underperformance of our education system and address it, we will see our state held back. 

If our private school system was producing these kind of outcomes, I suspect politicians would have acted yesterday.  Instead, the inconvenient facts are brushed under the carpet.

If we are to change Mississippi for the better, this has to change.  Policy makers must not keep going along to get along.  That is a recipe for yet more mediocrity. 

The time for taking false comfort in marginal improvements is over.  The implementation of phonics reading in primary schools might indeed have raised reading standards, but on its own, it is not the strategic change in education we need.

If we want an education system that prepares young people for the life they might live, we need action to ensure:

• Higher standards in the classroom – which means more parent power. 

• Ensure more of our high school graduates complete a useful education after high school.

• Allow students to take degrees with better returns on investment, both for the individual student and the state as a whole.

Douglas Carswell is the President and CEO of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy