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For decades, America has been told that the key to better schools is more money. Underperformance, the argument runs, is really a question of resources. Just give the teacher unions what they ask for, and good outcomes will follow.

Mississippi is starting to show that this simply is not true.

Over the past decade, Mississippi has made such progress in fourth grade reading that people have taken to calling it the “Mississippi miracle.” Mississippi ranked 9th in the country for fourth grade reading in 2024, up from 49th in 2013 — a forty-place climb in a decade, from near the bottom of the table into the top ten.

Mississippi’s fourth graders now read better than their peers in New York, Minnesota and California — every one of them a state that spends a great deal more per child than we do. And here is the part the spend-more crowd would rather you did not dwell on. We get those better results on far less money.

Mississippi spends around $12,300 per pupil, one of the five lowest figures in America. New York spends $31,918 — more than two and a half times as much — and its children read less well for it. New York, in other words, buys more than two dollars of schooling for every one of ours, and ends up further behind.

Perhaps the starkest comparison of all is with California. A Black fourth grader in Mississippi is now somewhere between two and a half and three times more likely to read at grade level than a Black fourth grader in California — 19 percent reach proficiency here, against just 7 percent there — and California spends well over half as much again per pupil as we do. If money were the answer, those numbers would be the other way round.

There is no reliable relationship between what a school spends and what its children actually learn. Mississippi proves this point not only when you compare our results to other states, but when you examine what is happening inside Mississippi in granular detail.

Here at the Mississippi Center for Public Policy, we built a free online tool — CompareMySchool.com — that lets any parent in the state see exactly how their school is doing. Type in a school’s name and up comes its grade, the share of children reading and doing math at grade level, and how it ranks against every other school in Mississippi — and against the rest of America, too.

We intended it to be a tool for families to use this summer, as they contemplate the start of the next school year and perhaps begin to wonder if their kids are in the right school. CompareMySchool.com pulls all of the data into one place, in user friendly format.

But once we built the site, something unexpected leapt out. The tool lets you line up every school district in Mississippi and set what it spends per pupil against how its

children actually perform. If the conventional wisdom were right, you would expect a clear pattern: the more a district spends, the better it does.

There is indeed a correlation between spending and outcomes, but it is the opposite kind of correlation. The higher the per pupil spending the worse the grades.

Higher spending, worse results

Across Mississippi’s districts, higher per-pupil spending goes hand in hand with worse outcomes, not better ones. The lowest-spending quarter of districts gets, on average, 63 percent of children to proficiency in reading and math. The highest-spending quarter manages just 36 percent. Read that again. The districts spending the most are getting barely half the results of the districts spending the least.

Ocean Springs, down on the Gulf Coast, is the top-performing district in the state - more than three-quarters of its students at proficiency - on about $10,300 per pupil. Jackson Public Schools spends $16,640 per pupil, more than 60 percent more than Ocean Springs, and gets fewer than a third of its children to proficiency. Petal spends roughly 42 percent less per pupil than Jackson — and more than doubles Jackson’s results. DeSoto County, the largest district in the state, educates nearly 34,000 children on the lowest per-pupil budget in Mississippi — and still beats Jackson almost two to one.

Our webtool also allows families to compare what their public school district spends against what the local private school down the road charges to do the very same thing — and the gap is startling. 

Jackson Public Schools spends $16,640 of public money on each child. A few minutes away, there are private schools that charge about a third that amount.  It’s the same story across the state where typical private school charges about $7,000 a year, while often getting far better results. The public sector, it turns out, is not the cheap option. 

What matters is not how much a district spends, but how it spends it.  This data in Mississippi strongly suggests that what we need to see are reforms that allow families dissatisfied with what their school board has to offer with the option of taking their child’s share of funding to a school outside government control.

Mississippi’s own data — now in the hands of every parent at CompareMySchool.com — makes the argument that money is not the answer. Better-run schools are, and the surest way to get more of them is to trust parents to choose.

Lawmakers across the country often insist on making “investments” in economic programs to help fill a perceived need for skilled workers. But such efforts often put the needs of the state and favored industries ahead of the needs of individuals -- and they miss big picture questions in the process. 

This critical view should be taken about the newly passed UPSKILL program, which is expected to cover tuition and fees associated with getting a certificate or degree at a Mississippi public community or junior college. The program, in House Bill 562, passed with unanimous support from lawmakers and the governor signed it into law.

Initially, the program will be exclusively for Mississippians overcoming opioid addiction, hence the funding source of the program starts with money from $50 billion opioid settlement to state, local, and tribal governments. Republican Sen. Nicole Boyd told her colleagues that the program will be good for people in recovery.

“It is the program where we encourage those that are over age 24 to up-skill and get into high priority work sectors,” she said, according to the Magnolia Tribune.

The Design Problem: Labor Market First, Person Second

But UPSKILL’s eligible programs will be determined annually by the state’s review of employer demand and workforce shortages — essentially, what the labor market needs. That sounds sensible, but in practice those designations are heavily influenced by major employers who want a trained workforce pipeline at public expense. The program could function as a publicly-subsidized labor supply program for specific private employers without those employers contributing to its cost.

Crucially such an approach underemphasizes, and even ignores, the fact that each person is born with unique gifts and talents. Asking what the labor market needs and then pushing people into state-sanctioned boxes is the reverse of what should be happening.

A person with a gift for artistry, writing, craftsmanship, early childhood education, or caregiving work might find little room in a program built around HVAC, welding, and construction certifications. The program, therefore, treats people as inputs to an economic system rather than as individuals who deserve respect for escaping addiction and now have distinct contributions to make.

The state might (and probably will) eventually justify the program’s existence and call for its expansion as students apply for funding to gain a certificate or degree in an approved field and shortages in some areas are ameliorated. But in such an analysis, there’s no accounting for quality of life, e.g., if a person finds himself in a job he never wanted just because money was available to meet the need.

The Community Problem: What the State Crowds Out

It’s also worth noting that the program creates a transactional connection between a person and an employer-defined credential, but it severs and discourages the community connections important to the growth and wellbeing of a person, especially one in recovery. The state stipend is $500, which would be a manageable dollar amount for local charities, churches, civic organizations to offer, if they were so inclined.

UPSKILL’s enabling legislation intends participants to tap into other government assistance programs, including Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) to provide up to $250 for “emergency aid, childcare stipends or transportation assistance (bus vouchers or gas cards).”

That leaves no room for local charities and organizations to engage. If they were invited to, they could offer things the state is not offering: mentorship, peer cohorts, community check-ins, drug rehab integration circles, stuff that goes beyond a program and several hundred dollars. Recovery communities know that sustainable reintegration requires more than a job; it requires belonging.

The state program also has the deleterious effect of creating an expectation that the state will step in to offer money and support services, because that’s what the state does, as proven by this program. One could reasonably ask, “where does the state’s role stop and the community effort begin?”

A person who has spent ten years in a low-wage job, never touched drugs, but lacks the credential to move up — isn’t he or she equally deserving of support? The program’s initial gatekeeping, driven by the funding source, creates a hierarchy of deservingness that puts former addicts ahead of people who also struggle.

None of this is to say the problem UPSKILL is trying to solve isn’t real. Mississippi has thousands of job openings and communities hollowed out by addiction. The state stepped in precisely because communities, churches, and civic organizations hadn’t filled the gap at scale. That’s worth acknowledging honestly. It’s also worth understanding why. Is it possible that the state government’s broad list of programs, decades in the making, played some part in the lack of persistence of non-governmental organizations to meet local needs?

The critique isn’t that the need doesn’t exist — it’s that the state’s instinct to solve it by building a pipeline for employers, rather than building up people, reflects a persistent confusion about what investment in human beings actually looks like. It also avoids the bigger questions about systemic problems that Mississippi, and many other states, must begin to understand.

— Wayne Hoffman is President of the public policy education and advocacy organization, Level Up Humanity, and is a research fellow of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy.

Imagine your family spent more this year than you earned. It wouldn't be comfortable, but you'd manage. Now imagine your family had spent more than it earned every single year since 2001. By now you'd be destitute.

Well, that is exactly what the federal government has been doing.

For the past 25 years — ever since Bill Clinton left the White House — Washington has spent more than it has taken in. Every single year. The result is a national debt that now stands at $39 trillion.

In 2001, the United States owed less than $6 trillion. Today we owe nearly $39 trillion. That means the federal debt has grown by $33 trillion in just 25 years.

The pace is accelerating

Here is the worrying part. In the entire 212 years from George Washington's first inauguration through Bill Clinton's last day in office — through the Civil War, the Great Depression, two World Wars, and the Cold War — the United States ran up $5.8 trillion in debt.

In the 25 years since, we have added $33 trillion more. More than four-fifths of the total debt has been acquired in the past quarter-century.

And it is getting faster. Of that $39 trillion, $2.7 trillion was added in just the past year. A staggering $10 trillion — more than 27 percent of every dollar America has ever borrowed — has been piled on in the past five years alone. The federal government now adds roughly $8 billion of new debt every single day.

What a trillion actually looks like

Millions, billions, trillions. Our brains are not wired to grasp numbers this large, so let me put it another way.

A million seconds ago was about 11 days ago — late April. A billion seconds ago was 32 years ago, in 1994, when something called the World Wide Web was just getting started.

A trillion seconds ago? That was around 32,000 years ago. Woolly mammoths still roamed Europe, farming had not yet been invented, and no one (we think) had yet made it to North America.

That is what a trillion looks like. And we owe almost forty of them.

The Ferguson limit

Great nations are rarely destroyed by external enemies. They are more often destroyed by debt.

The historian Niall Ferguson has warned that when the crushing cost of servicing old debts begins to crowd out the essential investments that sustain national strength — especially defense — decline becomes almost inevitable.

History is littered with cautionary tales. Habsburg Spain. Bourbon France. The Ottoman Empire. Each was once the greatest power on earth. Each was overstretched by debt.

Ferguson identifies a critical threshold — sometimes called the Ferguson limit — beyond which a great power cannot long survive: the moment a nation spends more on debt interest than on defense. At that point, fiscal arithmetic begins to dismantle geopolitical power.

The United States is now flirting with that threshold.

What's at stake

A few months ago, I was at the Ole Miss game in Oxford when a B-2 stealth bomber flew over the stadium. The crowd went wild. It was one of the most thrilling sights I have ever seen — a symbol of American strength, the kind of demonstration of raw power that not only keeps the United States secure but keeps the bad guys across the globe in line.

Each B-2 cost over $2 billion to build, which is why only 21 were ever produced. Keeping one in the air costs about $150,000 per hour.

The risk is that one day the United States — like Habsburg Spain — will simply not be able to afford the things that make us strong. And it isn't just the defense budget at stake. Will America be able to pay its Medicaid bills? Its pensions? Its Social Security obligations?

Spending restraint and growth

We pour enormous attention into elections and congressional redistricting. But unless we get the debt under control, none of that will matter.

At the start of President Trump's second term, I had high hopes. Elon Musk and DOGE talked seriously about reducing public spending. I hoped Congress might finally wake up and do its job.

But cutting spending alone will not be enough. We also need economic growth — and I am confident we are on the cusp of a massive AI-driven productivity boom that could deliver it. Spending restraint and growth, working together, could narrow the deficit over a decade or so. Eventually we could even begin to pay the debt itself down.

This — not the midterms, not the game of musical chairs over congressional districts — is what really matters.

Controlling the deficit will decide whether our children's children live better lives than we do, or whether we follow Europe down the path of higher taxes, rising costs, and demographic decay.

It was a particular pleasure this week to welcome Gad Saad and his wife to Mississippi.

Gad is one of the most important conservative thinkers writing today. His new book, Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind, is published next month, and I am the proud owner of a signed copy.

Gad Saad's new book is an instant bestseller!

Host of the Saad Truth podcast, Gad is now connected to the University of Mississippi's Declaration of Independence Center — one of the emerging citadels of intellectual excellence in American higher education today.

Gad is not just another academic. His work really matters to the future of the West.

How postmodernism quietly took over the West

For several decades, postmodern ideas hatched in the seminar rooms of 1960s France have been percolating through American academia — and from there into the corporate world, the public sector, the press, the courts, and the schools.

Postmodernism teaches that there is no objective truth and no shared moral order, only competing perspectives shaped by power. From that follows cultural relativism: no culture, no tradition, no inheritance can be judged superior to any other. By the time the rest of us noticed, these insane ideas had quietly become the unofficial creed of the Western managerial class.

This is how so much of America went "woke." These ideas encouraged a generation of young Americans to embrace identity politics — to stop seeing themselves as free individuals in charge of their own destinies, and instead to define themselves by where they sit in a hierarchy of victimhood based on race and sex.

The result is profoundly demoralizing — in two senses of the word. It has stripped us of confidence in our country and our culture. And it has made it literally harder for people in positions of authority to exercise moral judgement at all.

Allan Bloom warned us of this forty years ago in The Closing of the American Mind. Until now, however, the conservative movement did little to stop it.

Signed by the author…

What "suicidal empathy" means

Gad has dissected the way postmodernism turns empathy with the marginalized into the supreme moral test. He calls it suicidal empathy — an irrational form of altruism that hijacks our moral judgement.

The result is a society that protects criminals over their victims, privileges illegal migrants over citizens, condemns self-defense as toxic, and lets feelings outrank facts. Aimed at the wrong target, in the wrong dose, empathy does not save a civilization. It dismantles one.

Why this work aligns with Mississippi

What Gad is doing aligns with what we are doing here at MCPP, where we run programs that teach young Mississippians about American exceptionalism and the moral case for the free market. Our illustrated children's book, What Makes America Special, aims to teach 7- to 10-year-olds the truths that will protect them from the woke mind virus in later life.

As Mississippi's economy flourishes, it is increasingly clear that our state has led the way on free-market reform. Perhaps now we need to lead the way on an even more important mission: the recovery of the American mind — and the defeat of divisive, "woke" ideology.

Thank you, as always, for standing with us.

In April, we had the opportunity to welcome students from Pearl River County High School’s Student Council to our office during their visit to Jackson.

As part of a broader trip to tour the State Capitol and meet with legislators, the group made time to sit down with Douglas Carswell and our team to learn more about the role of a public policy organization and the work we do at the Mississippi Center for Public Policy.

The visit centered around a roundtable discussion covering how think tanks operate, the principles that guide our work, and how policy ideas move from conversation to implementation. Students engaged directly with our team, asking thoughtful questions about the challenges facing Mississippi, the importance of free markets and limited government, and the practical side of advancing policy solutions.

What stood out most was the level of engagement—from both the students and the educators accompanying them. The discussion was curious and encouraging, reflecting a strong interest in understanding how ideas shape real-world outcomes.

Opportunities like this matter. Creating space for young people to ask questions, engage with policy, and better understand the institutions shaping their state is an important part of building informed, thoughtful leaders for the future.

We are grateful they chose to spend part of their time with us, and we look forward to seeing where their leadership journeys take them.

While others debate these ideas from a distance, we’re in the room teaching them.

This semester, Douglas Carswell was invited to serve as a guest lecturer at the Declaration Center for Freedom Studies at the University of Mississippi—spending the semester working directly with students on the principles that make societies prosper.

Week after week, he made the drive to Oxford to lead conversations on free markets, limited government, and individual liberty—not as abstract theories, but as ideas with real-world consequences. Students were challenged to think critically, engage deeply, and wrestle with the foundations of a free and flourishing society.

Free markets. Limited government. Individual liberty.

The next generation isn’t just hearing about these ideas—they’re being trained in them, challenged by them, and equipped to carry them forward. In a time when many institutions are moving away from these principles, opportunities like this matter more than ever.

Not slogans. Not trends.
Real ideas, taught in real classrooms, to the next generation of leaders.

This is how you build something that lasts.

Mississippi lawmakers say they’ll spend part of the summer studying the state’s Medicaid program to see if there’s a way to save taxpayer money. But if recent history is any indication, the effort will not yield significant fruit.

Lawmakers in other states have, for years, picked through the federal-state medical welfare partnership, and so far, the best they’ve been able to do is slightly lower the annual increases.

Knowing the outcome of the inquiry is obvious, perhaps lawmakers would be better served in examining the questions that, so far, no state has dared to address:

This is not to say that state officials should not bother spending their time looking at the financial ledger of the state’s Medicaid program, overturning all the accounting rocks in search of waste, fraud, abuse, and potential for savings. But this leaves untouched the matter of what happens to society when compassion becomes a line item, when caring for the vulnerable is outsourced to a bureaucracy, and when neighbors are quietly absolved of any felt obligation to one another.

The Legislature already knows that real reforms — and therefore, real savings — require doing the things no one seems willing to do, such as wholesale elimination of the program’s federally unrequired elements, including prescription drugs and prosthetics.

Indeed, most states including Mississippi have found eliminating program components politically undesirable, and so they avoid raising the question. The reason is not simple electoral cowardice. It is that decades of Medicaid have conditioned Americans to regard government-provided care as so natural that imagining its absence feels monstrous — even though government is filling the role once held by the private charitable networks, church benevolence funds, and community mutual-aid societies.

When the government guarantees a service, the moral urgency to provide it privately fades. The obligation migrates, and with it, something irreplaceable about how a community understands its own members.

Of course, the most optional part of Medicaid is the decision of a state to offer the program at all. No state is required to participate in the Great Society program that Congress passed and President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law in 1965. States have, one by one, agreed to participate. Mississippi joined in following a contentious special session of the Legislature in 1969. And to date, not a single state has seriously weighed the prospect of dropping from the program, even as costs skyrocket.

Across the country, Medicaid is now the largest program that states administer, far surpassing education as the government’s chief responsibility by cost. Mississippi is expected to spend roughly $8.5 billion on government-run healthcare in the budget year that starts July 1. The state’s portion of the tab will cross $1 billion for the first time, an increase of roughly 16%.

Meanwhile, the loudest debate in Mississippi Medicaid circles is whether the state should expand coverage under the Affordable Care Act to able-bodied, childless adults. Expansion proponents argue that the federal government would cover 90 percent of the cost, that hundreds of thousands of working-age Mississippians fall into a coverage gap, and that rural hospitals struggle with uncompensated care.

Opponents argue the long-run costs are uncertain, federal promises are unreliable, and expansion would add 200,000 or more people to a program already straining the budget.

Both sides are, again, counting money. Neither is exploring the tougher, more challenging matter.

Mississippi has a tradition — rooted in its churches and towns, its extended families and its history of community survival under genuine hardship — of people caring for one another without being instructed to by statute. That tradition has not been destroyed by Medicaid, but it has been crowded out.

When the government guarantees a service, the neighbor who once organized the collection plate for a sick family now assumes there’s a government program somewhere to handle it. He doesn’t need to know about the struggles occurring on his block, across town, or on the other side of the state.

People who are sick need care, and the mere existence of a program is not care. “Care” requires active awareness of the plight of others. Such knowledge can seemingly challenge the capacity of voluntarism alone. But “challenging” doesn’t mean impossible. And it’s important to remember that Medicaid, as large as it is, still has a tough time meeting the needs of the people, in part because it is so large — and because bureaucratic rules often displace personal judgment and local knowledge.

The question is not whether the sick receive help but through what means, and at what cost to our common life and our moral character as a people.

Mississippi has spent decades and tens of billions of dollars discovering that you can administer a program for hundreds of thousands of people; you can budget it and audit it and let contracts for it, but you cannot manufacture compassion or replace what is lost when the community stops being its own first answer.

If Mississippi lawmakers really want to understand Medicaid and its consequences, these are the questions they should spend their time considering this summer.

— Wayne Hoffman is President of the public policy education and advocacy organization, Level Up Humanity, and is a research fellow of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy. 

ALEC's Rich States, Poor States index now has Mississippi at 24th for economic outlook. The trend lines, and the policy choices behind them, explain why.

The latest Rich States, Poor States index has just been published by ALEC, and for anyone who cares about the direction of our state, it makes for encouraging reading.

Mississippi now ranks 24th in America for economic outlook. That is a forward-looking measure, built from fifteen different state policy variables — tax burden, regulatory environment, labor law, and more. A decade ago, the idea of Mississippi sitting in the top half of that table would have been difficult to imagine. Today, we are there — and we are still climbing.

Three trends worth noting

Public sector shrinking, private sector growing. The number of public sector employees in Mississippi is falling — which means the private sector, the part of the economy that actually generates wealth, is becoming more prominent. That is a structural shift, not a one-off.

Public Employees Per 10,000 of Population (full-time equivalent)

The cost of doing business is falling. The non-wage costs of hiring people in Mississippi have come down steadily. That is one of the reasons so many firms are now choosing to invest here rather than somewhere else.

Average Workers' Compensation Costs (per $100 of payroll)

More people are moving in than out. This may be the most important of all. For too long, young Mississippians moved to Birmingham, Nashville, or Austin to find better opportunities. Now, at last, the trend is reversing. More people are moving to Mississippi than leaving it.

Absolute Domestic Migration

How we got here

None of this happened by accident. It is the cumulative result of half a decade of serious policy reform — and at every stage, opposition was loud.

In 2021, Mississippi enacted serious labor market reform — making it easier for people to work, to train, and to move between careers.

In 2022, we replaced an old, progressive tax code with a flat tax.

Year after year, we have kept energy costs among the most affordable in the country — a quiet advantage that every family and every employer benefits from.

In 2024, we passed education funding reform so that the money at last follows the child.

In 2025, we enacted the historic elimination of the state income tax — a policy that only a few years ago was dismissed as politically impossible.

And in 2026, we have begun to take on the thicket of red tape that has held back our healthcare economy.

Every one of these reforms was resisted. Each was said, at the time, to be too ambitious or too politically risky. Each now stands as part of the answer to why Mississippi is moving up the rankings.

How laws actually pass

Ideas do not turn into law without people willing to fight to make it happen. Sycophancy might get you into the signing ceremony. It takes robust advocacy to ensure that there is a bill to be signed in the first place.

The rest of the country is beginning to notice. Mississippi is no longer the state that others use as a punchline. We are becoming a state that others are studying.

There is a great deal still to do. But the direction of travel is clear — and you have helped set it.

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