Mississippi occupational licensing burden places it in the top half among the 50 states and the District of Columbia.

According to the non-profit Institute for Justice, Mississippi’s overall burden was ranked 19th overall. California had the highest burden, while Wyoming had the lowest. 

The overall burden combines the number of low-and-middle income occupations, along with other factors including average fees, average calendar days lost, average exams, average minimum grade, and average minimum age. 

IJ reviewed 102 occupations, and Mississippi licenses 66, or about 65 percent of all low-and-middle income occupations. Only 14 states license more occupations. Louisiana and Washington both license 77 occupations, the most, while Wyoming licenses just 26. 

Mississippi does well, however, in the burden required to obtain a license coming in at just 46th. The average fees in Mississippi total $330, while the average days lost is 160. 

Today, approximately 19 percent of Mississippians need a license to work compared to just 5 percent in the 1950s. The net result is that Mississippi has lost 13,000 jobs because of occupational licensing and the state has suffered an economic value loss of $37 million. 

To put that into perspective, just by legislative action to rollback unnecessary licenses, we can create two Nissan plants…without spending a dime of taxpayer dollars.

Instead of relying on government, these are actions that will encourage and promote economic growth in Mississippi. If that is our goal, we need to trust in the benefits of the free market and a “lighter touch” from government and occupational licensing regimes and we need to return to a belief in individual responsibility.

There were no clear winners of Wednesday’s Republican gubernatorial debate, but both candidates were able to clearly differentiate their policy positions.

Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves and former state Supreme Court justice Bill Waller battled over such topics as Medicaid expansion, infrastructure, the economy and teacher pay. 

The most pointed difference of the night was when both were asked what it meant to be a true conservative.

Reeves said being a conservative to him meant limited government, low taxes and more freedom. 

Waller said that his plans were true conservative plans because they were the pillars of economic development and that a true conservative wouldn’t allow 31 rural hospitals to close and choose not to fill teacher vacancies. 

Reeves said that he’s opposed to expanding Medicaid (which he called and has called Obamacare) because it’d mean 300,000 more Mississippians would be dependent on government. 

He also cited information about Louisiana’s disastrous Medicaid expansion, where the number of new signups was vastly underestimated and three in five Louisianans have moved from private to public insurance.

Waller agreed with the 300,000 new Medicaid participant figure from Reeves and countered that information he’d seen from a Brookings Institution study that expanding Medicaid would help Mississippi’s 31 rural hospitals financially. He also said expanding Medicaid would have a billion dollar impact on the state’s economy.

A 2016 study by the Congressional Budget Office throws cold water on that viewpoint, saying that Medicaid expansion would not “substantially alter” the solvency of hospitals nationwide.

On infrastructure, Waller said his plan was a conservative, one-for-one tax swap, eliminating the state’s four percent income tax bracket in exchange for an increase in the state’s gasoline tax. He criticized Reeves about using lottery funds for infrastructure, saying that you can’t build roads on fluctuating revenues.

Reeves countered that a gasoline tax hike would add up to $240 million and that doing a swap would be a net $80 million per year tax hike on working Mississippi families.

Both candidates agreed that a teacher pay hike was needed and both want to increase the average salary to the southeastern average. 

Calls for expanding occupational licensure usually do not come from concerned citizens, but from industry insiders more interested in limiting the number of people who can work in their occupation. 

In 2018, the Mississippi legislature, with little discussion and few dissenting votes, passed a bill to make it more difficult to become a real estate broker. The proposed law sought to increase the time it would take to become a broker, going from the current one year to three years. 

Fortunately, Gov. Phil Bryant vetoed the legislation and it didn’t come back this past year. 

Who were the individuals supporting such legislation? It wasn’t a group of citizens negatively impacted by brokers who had just one year of experience. No, it was, naturally, the Realtors Association. And I am sure they would say they are doing it to protect you and me.  

More recently, the Mississippi Justice Institute filed a lawsuit against the Board of Cosmetology over requirements that eyebrow threaders receive 600 hours of instruction that don’t have anything to do with the practice of threading. 

When WLBT talked with a threader who completed the 600 hours of instruction, her response was that it’s not fair because she had to complete the classes for a license. Relevant or not. 

That’s certainly an understandable position. But the goal shouldn’t be to make the entrance harder for new entrants, but easier for everyone. 

That’s the case whether we are talking about the 66 low-to-middle income occupational licenses in the state or the 117,000 or so regulations in the state’s administrative code. 

A smart policy would start with only choosing licensure when there is empirical proof that it is necessary and there is not a less restrictive approach. 

As for the current licensing schemes, the legislature should begin by repealing unnecessary licenses. And occupational boards should not be in charge of deciding whether a license is necessary. 

Every year, bills to extend the repealer of various occupational boards come before the legislature. They always pass. Usually with no discussion and few dissenting votes. Instead of simply relying on what that board wants, the legislature should use that time to study if a license truly relates to health and safety. 

A great place to review each license would be the Occupational Licensure Review Board, which only has authority over new licenses or regulations. Empower the board to take a hard look at every license, it's need, and how it impacts the economy, for both entrepreneurs and consumers.

If we haven’t determined if a license actually protects us, rather than ceding that power to industry incumbents, we should opt for less red tape and more freedom.

And give more Mississippians the ability to earn a living, even if they don’t have government permission. 

On Tuesday, the Jackson City Council tabled for future discussion a possible lawsuit against the Mississippi Department of Transportation over which entity has responsibility for maintenance of Medgar Evers Boulevard.

Jackson city Councilman Kenny Stokes said at the city council meeting that the city’s legal department could find no record of the city council approving the 1987 deal for MDOT to delegate maintenance of the road to the city. 

Stokes, who represents Ward 3, said if the item wasn’t placed on the city council’s agenda in 1987 and approved, the transfer wasn’t legally valid.

According to maps, U.S. 49’s route merges with Interstate 20 westbound in Richland and follows Interstate 220 north before resuming its northwest route at Medgar Evers Boulevard north of the interchange. 

Medgar Evers Boulevard isn’t marked as U.S. 49 south of the I-220 interchange.

 “I’m real concerned how the 49 highway in Rankin County can get over a hundred million dollars for the stretch from Richland to Flowood and it’s not even going to the school, Piney Woods,” Stokes said. “This is the gateway, the 49 highway, Medgar Evers Boulevard, to hospitals. 

“This is a sweetheart deal in Rankin County and you have a duty not to discriminate with federal funds. We’re also going to ask the U.S. Congress to get involved.”

MDOT is spending $150 million to repair and expand U.S. Highway 49 between Richland and Florence, with a completion date set for next year. The project will expand the heavily-traveled highway to six lanes between the two Rankin County cities with new culverts, curbs and bridges.

According to MDOT traffic counts, some of the intersections on 49 between Richland and Florence average about 42,000 vehicles per day.

The possible lawsuit was also supported by City Councilman Aaron Banks, who represents Ward 6

“If that agreement wasn’t executed right, then the state should be on the hook,” Banks said.

Mayor Chokwe Lumumba said at the meeting that the city’s 1 percent infrastructure sales tax is going to fund a repaving project on Medgar Evers Boulevard.

According to Public Service Commission Chairman Brandon Presley, four out of the state’s 26 electric power associations have decided to provide internet service to their electric customers.

The four non-profit co-operatives— Tallahatchie Valley, Tombigbee, Alcorn and Prentiss — that plan to provide high-speed fiber internet to the home are all located in northeast Mississippi in Presley’s district and made their announcements within the space of a week. 

The four co-ops that will provide internet service have about 99,000 combined customers, which represents about 5.5 percent of the 1.8 million mainly rural customers in the state who receive their electricity from one of the EPAs.

Tallahatchie was the first to announce the decision by its members on August 9 and plans to offer the service across its nine-county service area. The news release says it’ll take about 48 months for the system to come online.

Prentiss will pick a contractor in the next two weeks. 

“We’re going to beat this drum until every dirt road and every house and every rural community at the end of the line has the same level of service as a city,” Presley said. He compares high-speed internet service with electricity and says a similar effort like the one that electrified rural areas needs to come from the federal government to bridge what he terms a digital divide.

The Mississippi Broadband Enabling Act was signed into law by Gov. Phil Bryant on January 30 and went into effect immediately. The law allows the state’s 26 EPAs, also known as cooperatives, to provide broadband to their primarily rural customer base.

The new law requires EPAs to conduct economic feasibility studies before providing broadband services, maintain the reliability of their electric service, maintain the same pole attachment fees for an EPA-owned broadband affiliate as for private entities wishing to use the EPA’s infrastructure and submit a publicly-available compliance audit annually.

Presley, a Democrat who’s running opposed for his fourth term as the PSC’s Northern District commissioner, also said Mississippi needs more federal funds to expand rural high-speed internet service and that the EPAs won’t be asking the state legislature for any funds this year.

“I don’t believe we’re getting too much federal money in Mississippi to help our people. We’re not getting enough,” Presley said. “We need it more than they need it in Maryland. We need it more than they need it in New York and California. 

“We need it because we’re on the bottom of the economic ladder and until we solve the digital divide in this state, we’re not going to help our economic problems in Mississippi and we’re not going unlock the opportunities that our people deserve to have.”

According to data from the latest FCC wireless competition report from 2017, there is a digital divide in Mississippi. Ninety-five percent of urban residents in Mississippi have access to high-speed internet service (defined as 25 megabits per second or faster). 

In rural areas, only half of residents have access to that level of internet service. In 12 of the state’s 82 counties, five percent of the population or less has access to high-speed internet.

In 27 counties, only 25 percent or less of the population has high-speed internet service available.

Presley is the incoming president of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, which is the nationwide trade association for public utility regulators. He said he’ll use that platform to help spread the word about the digital divide between rural and urban areas nationally.

If you haven’t seen an eyebrow threading salon yet, you will soon. The brow-shaping trend is sweeping the nation, and devotees of the practice swear by the technique for its precision, convenience, and affordability compared to waxing and tweezing. 

The threading craze is also inadvertently accomplishing something besides perfecting American arches: it’s exposing the shameless rent-seeking that litters the occupational licensing landscape across the country.  

Dipa Bhattarai is a graduate student in Mississippi.  She was born in Nepal, and has been threading most of her life. Eyebrow threading is a very safe method of hair removal that does not reuse the same tools on different customers and does not involve the use of sharp implements, harsh chemicals, or heat. Instead, this simple technique allows threading artists to use nothing but twisted cotton thread, acting like a mini-lasso, to remove stray hair. 

Dipa saw an opportunity to pursue her version of the American Dream when word of her threading expertise led to classmates clamoring for her assistance. She opened a threading store in a local mall. Her clientele grew quickly, and within months, she hired four employees and opened a second location. 

Because threading is so safe, no government license or training is required to offer threading services, and Dipa’s business is thriving. 

Just kidding. If you believed that, you haven’t been paying attention to the licensing industrial complex as it has metastasized across all 50 states.  Fueling this growth are practitioners of various occupations counterintuitively begging the government to impose regulations on them.  In exchange, they gain a sense of legitimacy and monopoly use of a title. These occupations typically have little or no connection to public health or safety – such as flower arrangers, horse massagers, and interior decorators. 

Industry insiders run the unnecessary licensing boards spawned by these regulations, often with no legislative oversight. They have an insatiable appetite for increasing their own job security and earnings by blocking new competitors from the business. Licensing boards are the new unions, and it’s no coincidence that the increase in the former has coincided with the decline of the latter. In the 1950s, only one out of twenty people required a government permission slip to do their job.  Today, that number has skyrocketed to nearly one in three.

Like regulatory black holes, no activity escapes these boards’ jurisdiction. Plucking hairs without a license? Heaven forbid. That is the practice of esthetics, and it can cost you. No encroachment on a licensing board’s turf is too petty to go unpunished. All in the name of protecting the public, of course.  

These protectionist-licensing schemes hurt workers of modest means and young people trying to get their start in life. Which brings us back to Dipa. Business was great, until an inspector for the Mississippi State Board of Cosmetology showed up, issued her a citation, and forced her to close down her business. Dipa had not realized a license was needed simply for eyebrow threading: this was America after all – the land of opportunity. 

When Dipa looked into the licensing requirements, she learned she would be required to take 600 hours of training, which would cost thousands of dollars, and the curriculum would not even teach eyebrow threading.  Instead, the classes would cover waxing, tweezing, makeup, facial massage, and a host of other irrelevant topics. Thinking there must have been a mistake, she contacted the Board. There was no mistake.  

Dipa took many of the required classes, but simply could not afford to take enough time and money away from her graduate studies to complete all of the Board’s irrelevant training.  She pled with the Board to let her thread, explaining that she did not want to perform any of the services taught in esthetician school.  The Board said its hands were tied: state law requires threaders to be licensed – an addition to the law that the Board lobbied for in 2013.  

Of all licensing boards, the Mississippi State Board of Cosmetology should know better.  In 2004, the Board was sued for an almost identical situation: requiring hair braiders to take 300 hours of classes that taught nothing about braiding. After the lawsuit exposed the absurdity of the regulatory regime, then-Governor Haley Barbour signed legislation that deregulated hair braiding.  In the 14 years since that law took effect, over 1,500 braiders have registered new businesses in Mississippi, and nobody has been injured by these unlicensed entrepreneurs. 

Dipa is now represented by the Mississippi Justice Institute, and we are proud to join her this month in filing a lawsuit to challenge the constitutionality of Mississippi’s eyebrow threading laws. But not every budding entrepreneur in America finds their way to a law firm willing to represent them for free. It’s time for the states to adopt substantial and comprehensive occupational licensing reforms. Smothering small businesses in pointless fees and regulation works against our economy and keeps the American Dream out of reach for new generations of entrepreneurs.

This column appeared in the Washington Examiner on August 19, 2019.

Staying at a Rankin or Jackson County hotel or eating at a restaurant there can get quite expensive thanks to local tourism taxes.

The highest combined sales taxes on hotel stays and meals at restaurants were located primarily in Rankin and Jackson counties, according to examination of data from the Mississippi Department of Revenue. 

Of the eight cities statewide with total tax levies of 11 percent of more on hotel stays, five of them — Brandon, Florence, Flowood, Richland and Pearl — are in Rankin County. 

The Gulf Coast is also expensive for visitors when it comes to local taxes. All of the other cities on the 11 percent or more list, Pascagoula, Ocean Springs and Moss Point, are in Jackson County. 

Total sales tax on hotel stays in Harrison County, which includes Biloxi, Gulfport, D’Iberville and Long Beach, add up to 12 percent. 

These taxes are earmarked for the Coast Coliseum and Convention Center and the collections amounted to $4,893,319 in fiscal 2019.

There are 28 cities or counties statewide with a combined sales tax for hotels that adds up to at least 10 percent or more.

In Brandon, local and state taxes total 12 percent on hotels. The city levies a three percent tax on hotels that helped construct the city’s amphitheater. Brandon collected $1,224,801 in fiscal 2019 from its special tax.

Rankin County adds an additional two percent tax on hotels, along with the seven percent state sales tax. The county earned $973,495 from its special tax in 2019.

Like its Rankin County neighbors, Richland has a three percent tax on hotels and a two percent tax on restaurants, in addition to what the county assesses. The city earned $476,566 in 2019 from its special tax.

Pearl has two separate taxes. One is levied in the whole city (three percent on hotels and one percent on restaurants), while the other is additional tax (two percent) assessed in the western Pearl restaurant district, which is the area surrounding Trustmark Park and the Bass Pro Shop. 

Pearl collected $1,909,707 in fiscal 2019 from its special tax.

As far as restaurant taxes go, Como in Panola County has the highest combined rate at 11 percent thanks to the state’s highest tax rate, four percent.  

The city has a population of 1,310. According to DOR statistics, the city has collected $73,355 in fiscal 2019, which ended July 1, after earning $70,195 in 2018.

Twelve cities, including Vicksburg, Batesville, Hattiesburg, Jackson and Starkville, have total tax rates on restaurant sales of 10 percent.

The 73 special local levies on restaurants and hotels — the tourism taxes — began life as local and private bills in the legislature. Ten of them are assessed by counties and the rest by cities.

Local and private bills usually benefit a city or county in a legislator's district and are one of the last chores the legislature wraps up before leaving town at session's end.

All of the new taxes will require a referendum of local voters before they can go into effect and usually have an expiration date of three years from passage. Though not all. 

Revenues from these taxes are supposed to go to tourism promotion, such as for a convention and visitors’ bureau, or parks and recreation.

The same rules that govern the passage of general and appropriation bills apply to the local and privates. A three-fifths majority of both chambers are required to pass a new tax, which are pitched as temporary taxes when pitched in a referendum and are often re-authorized when they expire after three years without input from local voters.

Of the special taxes, 39 of them are listed on the DOR site without repeal dates, meaning local officials would have to act to get them off the books.

The local and private committees in each chamber of the Legislature are the only committees authorized by the Mississippi Constitution, with the rest mandated by legislative rules and state law.

The politics of division might reign in our major cities. But in places like Jackson, hospitality and communal spirit are alive and well.

With senior year of college comes the expected announcement of one’s next steps in life. At Georgetown University, where I spent my undergraduate career, as well as at many other elite schools around the country, it seems that at least a plurality of students plan on either continuing their education or going to major consulting firms. While one can choose many roads, they almost all seem to lead to the same urban areas: D.C., New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, or San Francisco.

In January, rather than follow the well-worn paths of some of my friends and colleagues, I chose to accept an opportunity at the Mississippi Center for Public Policy, a state think tank in Jackson. I had friends who understood the decision, and I had friends who were perplexed by it. Over the next five months I found myself having to explain and defend why anybody would want to live in the South, declining the comforts so easily found in the nation’s largest cities.

Frankly, I understand the confusion. For at least four years, our mindset as students was centered around life in Washington, D.C., a vibrant urban area. The mainstream news outlets, our social media feeds, the movies we watched, and the politics we followed all suggested that big cities were the only places worth being, because that’s where the action was and will continue to be.

However, as I packed up the UHaul and left Georgetown behind, I felt a sense of comfort. The words “Go west, young man, go west,” so often attributed to Horace Greeley, played repeatedly in my head. I was proud of the fact that I was escaping the behemoth that is Washington, off on a new adventure.

For the past 10 years, since my dad had been transferred to the Pentagon in 2008, I had lived in or around D.C., and grown quite used to the city and its people. Entering Georgetown, I was sure that I wanted to stay in the area and get involved in politics. However, over the course of four years, as the tidal wave of progressive opinion steadily beat against me, it became clearer and clearer that the values I held dear were not fully acceptable on the campus or in the city. I was attacked and belittled, not only for my conservative politics but for my Christian faith.

It took far less than four years for me to grow tired of this toxic state of public discourse. Furthermore, for many in D.C.’s young political scene, too great attention was given to developing one’s next career steps rather than one’s self as a person. Jobs often took over life, and little time was left for other commitments. As I evaluated where I would go after college, I decided that, while I wanted a rewarding job, I also wanted to find an area where I could continue to grow in my faith, to get involved on the local level, and to develop myself as an individual. I wanted to find a community in which I could become attached and build a home. And I realized that all of this would be difficult in D.C.

On campus, the relentless culture of outrage was alive and well, as “woke” activists constantly pushed the boundaries on the next issue and demanded that all stand in lockstep with them as a testament to intersectionality. In moving South, all of that dissipated. The professional outrage is absent and community organizations are flourishing. People tend to spend more time at the local bluegrass exhibition than they do protesting.

In Jackson, people care more about the church community you’re a part of than the job title you hold or whether you have an R or a D next to your name. In Jackson, “Southern hospitality” is alive and well: people know their neighbors and sincerely care about how they’re doing. In Jackson, I have found my spirits lifted. It has become clear to me that, while the politics of division has taken center stage nationally, outside the cities, on the communal level, the best of our country is still thriving.

Undoubtedly, Mississippi is not a perfect place, far from it. But this state is built on a strong set of foundational values, which have provided a pleasant sense of relief against the growing social and political tribalism that was ever present in D.C. I have been welcomed into a community. It is here that I plan to put down roots, and I would strongly encourage others to think about doing the same.

This column appeared in the American Conservative on August 7, 2019.

In this episode of Unlicensed, we talk about the lawsuit the Mississippi Justice Institute filed against the Board of Cosmetology over licensing regulations for eyebrow threaders.

What is the state doing to prevent eyebrow threaders from working? And is this a widespread problem across industries in Mississippi?

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