Mississippi is on the up! Mississippi’s economic prospects have improved significantly and in terms of economic outlook our state now ranks 22nd out of all 50 US states.
According to research by ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, Mississippi’s economic prospects are now brighter than those of either Alabama or Louisiana. We are only just behind South Carolina.
ALEC’s report shows that the kind of free market reforms the Mississippi Center for Public Policy has helped champion in recent years work. They have helped lift Mississippi up five places in the rankings over the past year, and have directly improved Mississippi’s economic prospects.
This follows three significant free market reforms we have seen in our state in the past few years.
First and most obviously, we cut the state income tax. The Mississippi Tax Freedom Act 2022 was not only a massive tax break for hundreds of thousands of Mississippians. It means that we are moving to a flat 4 percent rate. The report clearly shows that this move has significantly improved the outlook for our state.
Second, Mississippi adopted a universal occupational licensing law. This sounds very technocratic, but the effect of this is straightforward. It removes a lot of red tape in the labor market, making it easier for outsiders to move to our state and get certified here if they have been approved elsewhere.
Even more important in the longer term, enabling outsiders to get more easily certified creates pressure within Mississippi to eliminate unnecessarily onerous regulation that prevents Mississippians from being certified. Already there has been discussion about eliminating a number of boards that frankly do little beyond restricting the number of people who can earn a living in a particular area of employment.
It is probably too early for the effect of this to show up in any data, but the cumulative effect over time could be profound.
Third, Mississippi has gradually reduced the percentage of the workforce on the public payroll. Historically our state has tended to have a lot of people working for the government. There are still, according to ALEC’s report, 606 public employees per 10,000 people in our state, but the numbers are starting to come down.
Why is this important for growth? If too many people work for the government, it takes talent away from the private sector, making it harder for businesses to find the right people. Working in the private sector often means that people are more productive and innovative than they would be working in a big government bureaucracy.
Mississippi, the report suggests, is part of a Southern success story. All the southern US states, with the exception of Louisiana, are in the top half of the country in terms of economic outlook.
At the bottom of the league table in terms of economic outlook at California (45th), Illinois (46th) and New York (50th).
This is clear evidence that economic momentum in America is shifting from the historic hubs in the Northeast, mid-west and west coast to the South.
The southern US is a success story – and thanks to free-market reforms, Mississippi is becoming part of this southern success story.
Douglas Carswell is the President & CEO of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy.
Britain’s shortest-serving prime minister is the UK’s Barry Goldwater. A failure at the time, but shown to be accurate in the long term
Liz Truss was in Washington last week. Speaking at the Heritage Foundation, she was unapologetic about her short-lived premiership. Indeed, she doubled down on her warnings that the US and the UK risk “becoming social democracies by the back door”.
Free-market capitalism in the West, Truss told her audience, “has gone off course”, with an anti-growth mindset pervading policymaking circles on both sides of the Atlantic.
While Truss was in America, Chancellor Jeremy Hunt announced the appointment of Megan Greene to the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee. His decision to elevate yet another establishment economist marinaded in Treasury groupthink underscores how spectacularly unsuccessful Truss’s short-lived efforts to overturn economic orthodoxy in Britain proved to be. The orthodox thinking that got Britain into its current economic mess remains entrenched.
Truss was right to recognise that Britain is in a mess. Growth over the past two decades has been dire, so bad, in fact, that it is difficult to think of Britain as a high-income country any more. Even Mississippi, the poorest state in America, is projected to overtake the UK in per capita income terms. Rather than try to address Britain’s low growth, the country’s economic establishment seems resigned to it.
When George Osborne created the Office for Budget Responsibility, his intention was to ensure that government economic forecasts were honest. What he actually did was to hand control over fiscal forecasting to the OBR, meaning that today it is the OBR, not the Treasury, that drives fiscal policy. This helps to explain why, after 13 years of Tory government, taxes and spending are so high.
Back in the 1960s and 1970s, Britain’s economic establishment believed that fiscal stimulus was the way to engineer economic growth. That was seen to fail, but today officials believe in using monetary stimulus. According to the experts, interest rates need to be lowered to stimulate growth when things are looking down, but raised when the economy perks up. Yet it has proved to be easier to cut interest rates than to raise them. Easy money has allowed overconsumption and ghost growth. Bad investments have been made by those desperate for higher returns. Over time, growth and productivity have stalled.
Ironically, it was as Truss was attempting to move Britain away from this model that some seriously bad investments made by UK insurance firms – so-called “liability-driven investments” – threatened to trigger a full-scale financial crisis.
Truss’s big mistake was not her analysis of the problem, nor even her relatively modest tax-cutting proposals. It was her commitment to a universal energy-relief scheme, which it was feared at the time might mean an additional £130 billion in spending.
Watching Truss in Washington, I thought of that great American conservative Barry Goldwater. Like Truss, he came to prominence promoting a radical new economic agenda. He, too, was to prove spectacularly unsuccessful. Goldwater’s 1964 campaign for the White House saw him lose by what was then the largest margin in history.
For several years afterwards, Goldwater – like Truss today – seemed a byword for failure.
But like Goldwater, Truss’s analysis of what has gone wrong is accurate. Her solutions, like his, are sound. In time, she too will come to be seen as an essential precursor for the change her country needs. As for those creatures of the establishment who are today back in control, they will one day be utterly forgotten – perhaps sooner than they might imagine
Douglas Carswell is president and CEO of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy. He was previously MP for Clacton.
This article was originally featured in The Telegraph on April 15.
Mississippi currently has a record budget surplus. As the Magnolia Tribune recently reported, total March 2023 state revenue collections were 16.84% over the sine-die revenue estimate for the fiscal year. Total year-to-date collections came in at $601,866,349 or 12.86% over estimates.
When revenues are far higher than expected there is always a danger that politicians will find new ways to spend it. To try to prevent that from happening, the Mississippi Center for Public Policy published a Responsible 2024 Budget for our state at the start of this year’s legislative session.
Overall, we are pleased to see that although spending increased it did so broadly at the rate we proposed.
The Mississippi Legislature officially set the Fiscal Year 2024 state general fund at $6.63 million. While this is the largest operating budget in state history, it was not as large an increase as we had feared.
In our Responsible Budget for Mississippi, we called for the state’s general fund to have an appropriations limit of $6.75 billion. It seems that lawmakers heeded our advice, spending well below the cap.
The FY2023 estimated state revenue collection is set at $6.987 billion. That leaves our state with at least a $600 million surplus just for this fiscal year alone since the budget for 2023 is only $6.3 billion. Mississippi already has a $3.9 billion surplus in the bank, and with the additional $6.3 million from this year, will have well over $4 billion.
Our report projects revenue collections for FY2024 to be $7.5 billion, according to Mississippi’s Joint Legislative Budget Committee, allowing for an even bigger surplus than the one we already possess. If the legislature continues to follow our responsible budget and caps spending each year at $6.75 billion, the state will see a $0.8 billion surplus each year.
What do we do with the surplus?
A large portion of the approximate $0.8 billion in yearly surplus could be used to further cut the state personal income tax. The data shows we can afford to do so.
The result would be more companies organizing in Mississippi, increased individual liberty and a booming economy.
While it is good news that we have both a budget surplus and room for future tax cuts, we should not lose sight of the fact that overall our state is heavily subsidized by federal spending. Ultimately, for our state to prosper we not only use our surplus to reduce taxes. We need state leadership willing to reduce our dependence on federal handouts as well.
A recent arrival in America, I often get asked what I like most about living in the United States. Here are my outsider’s impressions about the US and some of the many reasons I love living here.
The first reason I love living in America is Mississippi. I might be British by birth, but I’m Mississippi by choice – and I cannot think of any place I would rather live than right here in the Magnolia state.
The climate is delightful – even in July and August. There’s more sunshine most mornings in Mississippi than you’d expect to see in a month in London.
It’s not just the climate that is warm and sunny, but the people. It is often impossible to go and buy gas or groceries without falling into cheerful conversation with a total stranger. Never feel defensive about being from Mississippi. To me, it is an honor to call this place home.
Second, I love America’s energy & enthusiasm. It is easy to overlook things that seem familiar to us. We all take for granted what we know. But take it from me when I tell you that Americans are full of infectious enthusiasm.
Almost everyone you meet is upbeat about something. Folk harbor real pride in their community, university, high school, military, work, state and, yes, country.
There’s far less of that cynicism-masquerading-as-sophistication in America compared with what you find elsewhere (Yes, and that’s even after you take into account one or two Mississippi newspaper columnists, too!).
I suspect that this enthusiasm is one of the secrets of America’s success. It helps explain why people in the United States are so entrepreneurial. Enthusiasm confers on Americans, especially younger Americans, a can-do attitude that drives them to do things and to innovate.
Third, I love American civic-mindedness. When tornados devastated several towns in the Delta the other week, I was struck by how ordinary Mississippians responded. They didn’t talk about what the government should do to help but did it themselves.
Churches rallied round. Rotary clubs and others sent supplies to those impacted. One gentleman I was talking to down in Pascagoula this week went to one of the areas affected and took it upon himself to rebuild the home of someone that he met there.
When Fox News’ Douglas Murray came to speak in Jackson a while ago, he explained why he was optimistic about America’s future. Americans, he said, don’t sit around waiting for the cavalry to arrive. They realize that they are the cavalry – and act. I can see what he means.
Fourth is football (although some of y’all perhaps think that should be first). I was raised playing rugby and cricket, and I never saw a football game until two years ago. Now there’s nowhere I’d rather be on a Friday night than watching the local high school game.
Football is not just a game – it’s the entire school or university putting on a spectacular performance full of infectious pride. Come to think of it, football is a perfect fusion of American enthusiasm and civic-mindedness, which is maybe why I like it so much ….
“Is there anything you miss about England?” I am occasionally asked.
America is awesome and there’s not much I would want to change about this amazing country. But if there were two things I would do differently, it would be hot tea and roundabouts.
No matter how much I love sweet tea, I sometimes struggle to find hot tea served the way it is supposed to be. As for roundabouts, they seem to me to be the perfect libertarian way of managing the traffic. No need for any government-run traffic lights, but an entirely self-regulating flow of traffic instead. I’m more than happy to live with those two minor imperfections.
Douglas Carswell is the President and CEO of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy.
MCPP CEO & President Douglas Carswell spoke at the Rotary Club of Pascagoula on Wednesday.
Douglas regularly attends luncheons hosted by Rotary Clubs, Kiwanis Clubs and other organizations to promote the mission of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy.
Anyone interested in having Douglas speak at a luncheon or meeting can make a request here. Aaron Rice, the Director of the Mississippi Justice Institute, is also available for speaking requests to discuss litigation and constitutional law in Mississippi.
American patriotism is in decline, according to a recent poll published by the Wall Street Journal. The WSJ-NORC poll makes grim reading. It shows a steep decline in the number of Americans who say that patriotism is very important to them, down from 70 percent in 1998 to 38 percent today.
There has also been a similar slide in the percentage of Americans who say that religion is very important to them. Perhaps most disturbing of all, only 23 percent of American adults under the age of 30 regard having children as very important.
These poll findings suggest the sort of collapse in self-confidence that you might expect to find in a country that had suffered defeat in war, or after a cataclysmic economic crisis. Why this loss of self-belief?
What explains this massive change in American attitudes toward their own country in the past 25 years? And what can we do about it?
America was founded on the principle that every American is created equal, and that each individual is in possession of inalienable rights. Of course, there were times when America failed to live up to those lofty ideals, but for the first two centuries of the Republic’s existence, these principles were the essential ingredient of American cohesion.
Thanks to these Founding principles, folk from different ancestral backgrounds in England, Poland or Italy, eastern Europe, west Africa or south Asia, could all come together and see one another as fellow citizens of the same Republic.
About 30 years ago, things started to change.
Rather than being taught to see themselves as individual citizens, young Americans were increasingly encouraged by left-wing educators to define themselves in terms of their racial background or gender or various other immutable characteristics. Many young Americans are invited to see their primary loyalty, not to fellow citizens of the Republic, but to whichever oppressed group it is that they supposedly belong to, in a hierarchy of victimhood.
The consequences of seeing the world this way can be murderous, literally.
For much of the 20th century, Americans were taught to believe that through hard work and perseverance, they could achieve anything. Today, many young Americans are invited to believe that nothing they do matters much since it is ‘the system’ that either privileges them or stacks the odds hopelessly against them. Is it any wonder that the same poll showed a sharp decline in the percentage of young Americans who believe in the importance of hard work?
Unequal outcomes between Americans are increasingly attributed to ‘systemic’ discrimination, rather than being seen as reflective of differences in individual behavior. As a result, in the name of ‘equity’, we have started to see a return of government-sponsored discrimination, further undermining America’s Founding ideals.
If you spend three decades trying to make Americans believe that their country is, as CNN might put it, a Republic founded by slave owners on stolen land, it is hardly surprising that patriotism then declines.
If you tell a generation of young Americans that human civilization has messed up the planet and that looming eco-catastrophe means we are all doomed, you should not be surprised that they are less keen on having kids than their grandparents.
This new poll shows that bad ideas have bad consequences. Combating bad ideas, and countering them with good ideas is what we at the Mississippi Center for Public Policy do. Here is how we are helping lead the fight back.
Last year we led the campaign for a law to combat Critical Race theory in our state. It was a good start, but it is not enough. Legislation alone will not stop ‘woke’ ideologues pushing their views on kids. We need to inspire the next generation of American leaders to fight back.
This is why we launched the Mississippi Leadership Academy last year. Two dozen future Mississippi leaders took part in the six-month program, one day a month. They heard from leading conservative historians, academics and authors. They were given an introduction to the morality of the free market and America’s Founding ideals. They listened to talks by some of our state leaders, including Attorney General Lynn Fitch and State Auditor, Shad White.
The program was so successful in energizing a cohort of young Mississippians, we will be expanding the program next year.
If we are going to root out left-wing ideology from the classroom, America needs an education revolution. In half a dozen states, including Texas, Florida and Arkansas, moms and dads now have control over their child’s share of education tax dollars. They can allocate their child’s portion of the budget (often around $10,000-15,000 a year) to a school of their choice – public, private or home-school.
The moment mom and dad have more control, guess what happens? Money gets spent in the classroom, not on an army of ‘woke’ education administrators. Schools stop promoting left-wing ideology and start teaching kids the way they should.
Sadly, in Mississippi too many self-styled ‘conservative’ lawmakers continue to have intentionally done everything they can to prevent education freedom. Every time a supposedly ‘conservative’ lawmaker thwarts school choice, they are helping sustain radical leftist ideas in the classroom. This needs to change.
Two years ago, shortly after I had arrived in America, I went to watch my first-ever game of football. It was at a local high school on a Friday night, and I did not even know the rules of the game.
Just before the start, the crowd rose to their feet to sing the Star Spangled Banner and declare the Pledge of Allegiance. So new was I to your country, I did not know the words of either back then.
But I did know I was witnessing something special; a display of authentic, uncomplicated patriotism. I was so moved that the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. Please don’t ever abandon that belief in your own country, as other less happy lands have done. American exceptionalism is worth fighting for.
Douglas Carswell is the President & CEO of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy.
(Jackson, MS): Former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos was in Jackson this week outlining her roadmap for education freedom in America.
At a lunch event hosted by the Mississippi Center for Public Policy in Jackson, Mrs. DeVos shared her candid thoughts on what it was like to work with President Donald in the White House.
A passionate campaigner for school choice, Mrs. DeVos spoke about how un-American much of our current education system actually is. Sharing her thoughts on the Covid lockdowns, Mrs. DeVos explained why the decision to lockdown schools was one of the worst decisions made by public officials ever. Covid lockdowns, she explained, set back the educational attainment of a generation of young Americans permanently.
Covid lockdowns did, however, alert parents across the country to what was happening – or often not happening - in the classroom. Since then, Mrs. DeVos explained, America has seen a ‘great parental awakening.'
Starting in Virginia, with the election of Glenn Youngkin, a parent-led revolution in education is underway. West Virginia, Arizona, Texas, Florida and Arkansas have all started to implement school choice programs that will allow moms and dads to allocate their child’s tax dollars to a school of their choice.
Mrs. DeVos talked about her new book, Hostages No More, which explains why education freedom is so necessary, and discussed what it might take to bring a similar change in education in Mississippi.
Interviewed on stage in front of hundreds of people by Douglas Carswell, President & CEO of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy, Mrs. DeVos talked about some of the vested interests that want to control every aspect of the education system.
She went on to explain why education freedom was essential in order to combat extreme ‘woke’ ideology in the classroom.
“Here in Mississippi, we passed a law to combat Critical Race theory,” Douglas Carswell explained. “Listening to Mrs. DeVos is it clear that that is not enough to stop radical leftist ideas being promoted in schools at taxpayers’ expense. Only education freedom – giving moms and dads the power to allocate their child’s share of tax dollars – will end the advance of ‘woke’ ideology in our schools."
A couple of months ago, Storm Elliot caused rolling blackouts in several Southern states. Luckily, most of Mississippi avoided power outages, but portions of Northeastern Mississippi that get their power from the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) experienced losses of electricity as TVA was forced to cut power to residents for the first time in its 90-year history.
To ensure nothing like that happens again, now might be the time to ask what we need to do to ensure that we have a reliable grid for the future. That means questioning some of the claims made by the wind and solar lobby as to the reliability of renewable energy.
Blackouts occur when there is not enough electricity supply on the grid to meet demand. This is a real challenge for energy companies, not least because electricity is consumed instantaneously. The grid is not a storage device, like a giant bathtub that fills with electricity for later use.
TVA experienced blackouts during Winter Storm Elliot because electricity demand far exceeded supply forecasts, and some coal and natural gas plants had unexpected problems causing them to go offline.
On the demand side, TVA set new all-time high power generation records on Friday, December 23rd, 2022, and it still wasn’t enough to keep up with demand on its system, forcing the company to initiate rolling outages for two hours and fifteen minutes.
According to Bloomberg, electricity demand surpassed expectations in part because there was a massive shift toward electric heating from 2009 to 2020. Demand also exceeded expectations due to a lack of historical data for similar cold snaps in December.
On the supply side, TVA experienced 6,000 MW of outages at power plants that resulted in the shortfall in supply. The Cumberland coal plant, a 2,500 MW facility owned by TVA, tripped offline due to frozen instrumentation, and a natural gas flows from Appalachia to the Tennessee Valley fell by half as a result of mechanical problems with pipelines, according to data analysis from BloombergNEF.
These factors converged to cause the Christmas Blackouts. However, if we learn the wrong lessons from Winter Storm Elliott, we will spend billions of dollars without reducing our risk of blackouts during future winter storm events.
Wind and solar advocates have correctly identified the problems that occurred with these specific coal and natural gas plants during Elliott, but they have offered “solutions” that are expensive, unreliable, and entirely unsatisfactory. In essence, they are faulting coal and natural gas power plants for not being dispatchable enough while simultaneously promoting energy sources that are not dispatchable at all.
For example, in the wake of the storm, RMI argued that building large, interregional transmission grids and more wind turbines would have helped alleviate the magnitude and duration of blackouts in the Southeast, which is plausible, but their implication that such a strategy could prevent blackouts in the future is misguided.
Becoming more reliant upon interregional transfers of wind energy will not necessarily shore up Mississippi’s electric grid during future winter storms because wind turbines in the Upper Midwest shut down when temperature dip below -22° F to prevent the turbines from sustaining damage.
This means that if we get an even colder winter storm, we can’t necessarily depend upon the wind fleet in the Upper Midwest to perform as well as it did during Elliott. Adding more solar to Mississippi’s grid will also be of limited value in future winter storms because winter peak electricity demand tends to occur at night—when the sun isn’t shining— but temperatures are coldest and demand for home heating is high.
Winter storms like Uri and Elliot have shown that fuel supplies for natural gas power plants can be compromised during extreme cold weather events. As our grid has moved away from coal and nuclear plants with onsite fuel storage, we have also increased our risk of blackouts.
To increase grid resiliency, regulators should consider requiring onsite fuel storage at natural gas plants—whether that be liquefied natural gas or oil at dual fuel plants—to ensure that grid reliability is not compromised by fuel supply interruptions. This strategy kept the lights on in New England while TVA was issuing rolling blackouts.
Winter Storm Elliott will be a lesson learned for future forecasting, but with the rapid electrification of the home heating sector, it is becoming increasingly clear that Mississippi and other states will need more dispatchable power plant capacity on its system to handle increasing electricity demand, not less.
Proposals to reduce the risk of power outages by building more wind and solar facilities are opportunistic attempts to “both sides” the reliability debate and draw false equivalencies about the relative reliability of wind and solar to dispatchable energy sources like nuclear, coal, and natural gas.
Resources are finite, so energy regulators must prioritize solutions like onsite fuel storage that will provide the highest value for the lowest cost. If we learn the wrong lessons from Elliott, then we will find ourselves in the same situation during the next winter storm event.
Isaac Orr is a policy fellow specializing in energy and environmental policy at the Center of the American Experiment.
What on earth is going on? Mississippi’s Senate just rushed through a bill that would make major changes to Mississippi’s school funding system, the MAEP, with very little advanced warning or discussion. The bill, passed unanimously, was hardly even debated.
If our elected representatives are serious about making big changes to education funding, why wait until the tail end of the legislative session? If we are to spend hundreds of millions more dollars on the education system, do we not owe it to the taxpayer to at least discuss how that money is to be allocated?
The MAEP, or to give it its full name, the Mississippi Adequate Education Program, has been inadequately funded for far too long. Were the Senate’s proposal to become law, it would be only the third or fourth time in three decades that MAEP has been fully funded.
But why now? Why rush such an important measure through the Senate with so little discussion? Why change a funding system that is already hideously complex and convoluted, without discussing how to reduce its complexities with those that have to work with it?
I can’t help but think this is not really about improving education in our state. It is political posturing in an election year.
Various candidates for office want to look like they are on the side of teachers. They appear willing to rush through legislation that they know has little chance of passing in the House in order to look like the good guys – and wrongfoot their rivals.
Forgive me for being a little cynical, but I wonder if when the Senate passed this bill it really did so expecting the measure to become law? Or, as seems likely, are they expecting the House to say ‘no’? If they did it expecting the bill to fail, then it seems like a pretty expensive press release.
Proposing to shovel more money into the school system in an election year is not going to fix our state’s education.
Over the river in Arkansas, the new Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders shows how these things should be done. She has outlined detailed, well-considered plans for change, inviting a coalition of different groups to engage with her proposals. She did not wait until the end of the legislative session to announce significant changes.
Gov Sanders is proposing to put a lot more cash into their school system. So much so, in fact, that by 2025 Arkansas teachers will have a minimum salary of $50,000 a year. But at the same time, Governor Sanders will give every family in the state control over their share of their kid’s tax dollars.
Mississippi leaders should be using any additional education funding as leverage to secure those kinds of changes to empower parents. Our state legislature should be the place to make carefully considered law, not ammunition for electioneering.
What we have instead is positioning and posture. This is short-term virtue signaling, not the long-term thinking we need to raise education standards in this state. Mississippi deserves better.