Liberty needs leaders, and to secure the future of the liberty movement in our state, we have launched the Mississippi Leadership Academy. We held our inaugural session on Saturday.
Twenty young people are taking part in this six-part program is designed to equip them with the skills necessary to be effective change agents in Mississippi.
The students, many of whom attend the University of Mississippi, Mississippi State University, Mississippi College and several local high schools, heard from former Representative Hon. Chip Pickering and the state director for Americans for Prosperity, Starla Brown.
MCPP CEO & President Douglas Carswell began the program by encouraging the students to think critically about issues within our state as they continue the course over the next six months. Pickering discussed what makes Mississippi a unique state, and Brown led her session on the importance of liberty.
The students proved to be intelligent scholars, asking thought-provoking questions and engaging in unique discourse about public policy.
The program ended with the students receiving two books — "Inventing Freedom," written by Daniel Hannan and "The Rational Optimist," written by Matt Ridley. In a few months, the students will get to speak with both of these authors and ask questions about the books and the themes within them.
The students will convene again in November for their second session where they will hear from State Auditor Shad White.
We're so thankful the first session was a success and look forward to meeting with our students again.
'An Absurd Narrative Mississippians Can See for
Themselves'
This article was originally published in The Epoch Times on Oct. 30, 2022.
As the finger-pointing over what caused the summer water crisis continues in Jackson,
Mississippi, a proponent of the free market and individual liberty examines how local
and national media coverage concocted two culprits—racism and climate change—to fit
a narrative disparaging to the state while downplaying what he said is the true cause:
incompetence.
For Douglas Carswell, President & CEO of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy
(MCPP)—a non-profit organization that advocates for low taxes, light regulation, higher
standards in education, and American exceptionalism—the divide between the media’s
narrative and what the people of Jackson were seeing with their own eyes became a significant wake-up call for the state capital.
“Any time something goes wrong in Mississippi, media will attribute it to events that happened 50 to 150 years ago to say that it’s all a consequence of white racism,” Carswell told The Epoch Times. “It’s an off-the-shelf template that reporters dust off whenever Mississippi comes up, but I think the water crisis was a tipping point for that narrative because ordinary Mississippians could see for themselves how ridiculous it really was.”
National and local media platforms blamed the water crisis on systematic racism within the majority-black city. Some reports got it entirely wrong by flat-out stating that the city had run out of water because of climate change, while, as Carswell pointed out, Jackson has one of the largest reservoirs in the southern United States.
“The Romans managed to master the technology of putting water into pipes to supply a
city with fresh water 2,000 years ago,” Carswell said. “There’s no excuse for Jackson
not to master that technology today. It’s incompetence, and the people of Jackson can
see that.”
While Carswell says the city government’s mismanagement is transparent, the
Mississippi chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP) has alleged that Republican Gov. Tate Reeves disinvested funds from Jackson
that could have gone to fix the problem.
The NAACP called on the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) recently formed
Oce of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights to investigate the matter,
stating in its letter to Reeves, “We have been in keen observance of the long history of
Jackson getting less than its fair share of public funding from the Mississippi state
budget and at times, being denied of any funding at all when it was deserved.”
The NAACP filed a complaint with the EPA under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of
1964, solidifying the allegation that the water crisis was caused by racial
discrimination.
The Oce of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights didn’t immediately
respond to a request for comment on the investigation.
On Oct. 17, Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), who serves as chair of the Committee on
Homeland Security and chair of the U.S. House Select Committee on the January 6
Attack, launched his own investigation into the state’s spending, asking Reeves for data
on how it plans to distribute American Rescue Plan Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure
Law funding.
President Joe Biden pledged millions to combat “structural racism,” which has led to
equity, diversity, and inclusion departments cropping up in government agencies.
Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba stated in a city press release, “We know that
the condition of Jackson’s water system didn’t happen overnight but is due to decades
of disinvestment in the city’s infrastructure.”
However, there are many within Jackson who have been watching this play out for
years and point to the city government’s own underinvestment in its water
infrastructure, which has led to 150,000 citizens without potable water.
According to Reeves in an Oct. 17 press release, “Throughout this emergency, we have
had to procure chemicals, workers, and materials for the city routinely because they
were incapable of doing so.”
Reeves added that the state has “poured millions of dollars from taxpayers of every
county into this effort to rescue the city from a crisis of incompetence.”
On Oct. 20, during a traditional turkey pardoning ceremony to support a campaign
designed to raise money for families in need for Thanksgiving, Reeves answered (the
discussion beginning at 14:00) a question from a reporter about the problems with the
city’s water system.
“The mayor has gone on national TV and blamed that on a lot of things,” Reeves said.
“But what we have proven over the last 52 days is the water struggles in Jackson were
specific to the incompetence of this administration.”
The state stepped in on Aug. 29, Reeves said, and set up a unified command structure,
naming both the Department of Health and the Mississippi Emergency Management
Agency as leads.
Within 72 hours, Jackson’s water was restored, Reeves said, and the boiled water notice
was lifted 15 days later.
“Running water systems isn’t that challenging,” Reeves said.
Out of his 19 years in office, with over 1,100 water systems in the state, Reeves said this
has been the only time he’s had to sign an emergency proclamation to ensure that
water was delivered to the city.
‘Grotesque Incompetence’
Carswell said much of the problem stemmed from a simple failure to bill its citizens.
“In 2017, Jackson’s water billing system collected $61 million in revenue, and the
operating costs of the city’s water system were about $54 million,” Carswell said. “That
left a healthy surplus that competent management might have allocated to meet
maintenance costs.”
In 2022, the amount of revenue collected is likely to be closer to $40 million, Carswell
said, “far below running costs.”
“Not only is there no surplus to go toward maintenance, but there does also not seem
to have been much maintenance even when there was a surplus,” Carswell said. “How
on earth does a city water authority manage to lose almost a third of its revenue in the
space of five years?”
In any given city, water is what Carswell called a “cash cow” because it has a captive
market.
“Citizens are billed, and they have to give the city government a check,” Carswell
explained. “What Jackson did is it monstrously failed to invoice people.”
Several years ago, the city government contracted with an engineering firm to set up a
new billing system, Carswell said, which ended in the firm being sued for $89 million,
leaving consequentially more money to be spent on city attorneys than on improving
the city’s water system.
“If a private business fails to invoice a third of its customers, it will go bankrupt,”
Carswell said. “Here we are in Jackson with the authorities failing to generate a third of
its revenue because they couldn’t get their act together and issue invoices.”
In addition to a failure to invoice, the city failed to have qualified personnel running
the water facilities, he said.
“The state repeatedly offered to help, and those offers were ignored,” Carswell added.
“Eventually, things got so bad that the state had to step in and pick up the cost of half of
it and fix things.”
After the federal and state governments stepped in, the total bill came to less than
$200,000, he said.
“It was a minuscule amount of money to fix a problem that was overwhelmingly
caused by grotesque incompetence among civic leaders in Jackson,” Carswell said.
The city of Jackson didn’t reply to The Epoch Times’ request for comment.
MCPP CEO & President Douglas Carswell was featured in an article discussing the Jackson water crisis. The story appeared in The Epoch Times.
MCPP President & CEO Douglas Carswell went to Washington D.C. this past week.
While people may have different opinions on some of the people there, DC is an impressive capital city. The Capitol Dome and the Washington monument are proud symbols of an America that believes in herself.
Douglas got to meet lots of fascinating folks at key conservative think tanks and foundations to learn more about what they are doing to fight for freedom at a federal level.
The Mississippi Center for Public Policy has also attracted a lot of interest given our success in delivering a conservative agenda in our state.
Mississippi might be one of the smaller states in the Union, but there is a lot of interest in how our state managed to cut the state income tax. Conservatives in the capital also wanted to hear about our occupational licensing law, the bill enacted to combat Critical Race theory and how MCPP helped defeat the Biden vaccine mandate.
Our policy wins are important because almost all of the great policy innovations in America come from the states, not from the federal government in Washington. For example, it was midwest states, not DC that came up with the notion of Charter Schools. It was cities that pioneered zero-tolerance policing. Today, it is states like Mississippi that show the way with tax cuts and deregulation.
Many conservatives in Washington are upbeat. Some seem to think that conservatives will do well in the mid-terms next month. Several say they were more optimistic than they were just a couple of months ago.
We at MCPP are optimistic, too. Not just because of what the conservatives might achieve in the mid-terms, but because what we are doing to move the dial in Mississippi is part of a conservative revival underway across America.
Mississippi’s economy suffered the least during the COVID-19 pandemic thanks to Governor Tate Reeves’ light-touch lockdown, according to new data released by the Center for American Experiment.
Gross Domestic Product is the total value of goods and services produced and while Mississippi’s GDP took a dip during the pandemic, the impact was less in our state than pretty much any place else in America.
The new study shows how lockdowns harmed each state's economy, but where lockdowns were less stringent and relied on individuals exercising common sense, the economic impact was less severe.
The report shows that New York, for example, which imposed an extreme lockdown at the insistence of its Governor, had a dramatic fall in economic output. In New York, the economic hit was the second highest in the United States.
While Mississippi participated in shutdowns for the first few weeks of the pandemic, many New York businesses were prohibited from opening their doors until June 2021, well into a year after the state’s initial lockdown in March 2020.
Lockdowns across the country tanked the economy in many states. But states like Mississippi, which tended to give individuals and organizations far greater autonomy to assess the risks and figure out how best to mitigate them, fared best.
In stark contrast to state leaders elsewhere, Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves defended the rights of businesses to remain open and for Mississippians to work. Local governments and school boards had the opportunity to continue lockdowns if they so chose to, but Reeves said the state would not create a state-wide order. The data in this report shows what a positive impact that approach had.
In consequence, Mississippi’s GDP has bounced back rapidly. In 2021, the total value of goods and services produced in the state was $104 billion, surpassing the pre-pandemic level. The GDP for 2019 was only $101 billion.
Last week a group of Los Angeles council members hit the headlines when they were secretly recorded discussing redistricting. Some of the language that they used was shocking, and their conversation was littered with casual racism.
The recording is revealing in another way. It draws back the curtain as a group of politicians try to cut deals. In a properly functioning democracy, voters are supposed to choose their politicians. In the recording, we hear politicians scheming to choose their voters.
"So what?" you might say. "This is gerrymandering, and it has happened for decades."
This was not just a conversation about how to achieve favorable redistricting, however. It sounded as if these Los Angeles councilors do not think of voters as individuals, but rather as ethnic groups that almost belonged to politicians.
As they discussed carving up Los Angeles between them, it was all about what is in it for "us" and our ethnic group, versus "them" and their ethnic group.
For most of human history, people were defined in terms of caste, race, class or birth. Then along came the Enlightenment and the American Revolution, and a radically better sort of society emerged.
In America, everyone was supposed to be an individual in possession of inalienable rights. Yet, here we are listening to progressive politicians in 2022 (the recording was actually made in 2021) talking as if none of that any longer applied.
The left’s relentless obsession with race is taking America to a profoundly dangerous place. Far from creating a more equitable society in which everyone has more opportunity, the Progressives will produce an American dystopia in which different groups compete with one another to carve up resources.
Do we really want to live in an America in which politicians, in the manner of mafia bosses, meet to cut backroom deals for "their" group over anyone else? Do we want a system in which mediocre political figures are given a free pass for their failings because they represent "us" against "them?"
There is nothing progressive about Progressives. To progress is to advance. Progressive politicians risk taking America back to a premodern past.
To help fight back, we are launching the Mississippi Leadership Academy. We will take a cohort of bright young Mississippians from different backgrounds each year and introduce them to the ideas that have made America great.
Those that take part will look at some of the public policy challenges we face in our state and hear from some of our state leaders. But participants will also consider how free markets and America’s Founding principles have helped forge the most successful country on earth.
As a conservative think tank, we have had plenty of recent wins helping cut the state income tax and defeating the Biden vaccine mandate. But our most important task is to make certain that the next generation of Mississippians understands and appreciates the principles that have made this country such a success.
Joe Biden recently declared that he was “sick and tired of trickle-down economics”. It is an approach, said the President on social media, that “has never worked”. But when was trickle-down economics ever tried?
Having spent much of my adult life in conservative circles on either side of the Atlantic, I have yet to meet anyone seriously proposing to make poor people prosperous by enriching the rich.
That is because trickle-down economics is a myth. It no more exists than the Loch Ness monster.
Why, then, does the President feel compelled to attack something that doesn’t exist? In common with every progressive leader since Bill Clinton, Biden uses attacks on a non-existent economic policy in order to misrepresent conservative tax policy.
Biden feels the need to attack conservative tax cuts as ‘trickle-down’ because the success of conservative tax cuts is a threat to Washington DC’s agenda.
When Mississippi passed the Tax Freedom Act earlier this year, we implemented one of the largest tax cuts in our state’s history. Cutting the state income tax in Mississippi meant that we joined forces with Texas, Tennessee and Florida in lowering the tax burden.
Progressive politicians in Washington DC cannot afford to allow the idea of tax cuts as a way of producing prosperity to take hold. If other states join Mississippi’s example in cutting taxes – as Missouri did this week - it will undermine the progressive claim that we need higher taxes and more government.
The federal government has only introduced substantial tax cuts on three or four occasions in recent US history; under Ronald Reagan in 1981 and 1986, under George Bush the younger in 2001-03, and then under Donald Trump in 2017.
On every one of those occasions, the left condemned them as ‘trickle-down economics!’. In retrospect, the biggest beneficiaries of the Reagan, Bush and Trump tax cuts were middle-income Americans.
If, as the left suggests, the conservatives introduced tax cuts as part of a diabolical scheme to benefit only the rich, they failed. The Reagan, Bush and Trump tax cuts helped all of America prosper.
Ironically, perhaps, the Reagan tax cuts even benefited progressives. The tax cuts of the 1980s produced such a tsunami of prosperity into the 1990s, the additional tax revenues that they generated allowed President Clinton to run a small budget surplus.
Tax cuts clearly work. There’s nothing ‘trickle-down’ about them.
Mississippi is on the front line in the fight for America’s future by showing that tax cuts offer an alternative to Biden’s tax-and-spend approach. No wonder the President is so keen to attack.
Amid the ongoing water crisis in Jackson leaving some people still without clean running water, Hinds County has opted out of trying to receive federal American Rescue Plan Act dollars.
Is this a principled refusal to tackle the DC dollar? Or just incompetence?
The federal government created ARPA in 2021 as a way to help local governments recover from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Its uses include improvements to water, sewer and infrastructure, along with compensating the public sector for lost money.
Mississippi received $1.8 billion in ARPA. Of that amount, the state legislature allocated $750,000 million to help support local governments to match some of the funds local entities have already received from the federal government – $450,000 specifically will be designated for water. To ensure this money was properly spent, the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality created the Mississippi Municipality & County Water Infrastructure Grant Program for local governments to apply for matching funds with a September 30 deadline.
Hinds County, the county with a failed water system, missed its deadline – intentionally, some suggest.
Hinds County received $45 million in federal ARPA dollars and could have been awarded up to $17 million if the Hinds County Supervisors attempted to apply for these funds. The county’s reasoning for missing the deadline? The hope that sitting out this round could result in more money in the state’s second allocation round in the spring.
But nothing is ever guaranteed, especially when it comes to public money.
The determination of how much matching funds a local entity receives is based upon a point system administered by MDEQ. Hinds County Administrator Kenneth Wayne Jones said the points Hinds County received were not enough to justify even applying for ARPA dollars from the state, and he believes going through the application again and looking for items the county might have initially missed will produce a greater outcome.
In its application, MDEQ states that the process among cities and counties will be very competitive, and some entities may have to apply multiple times before they receive any matching dollars. So even though Hinds County believes it could be allocated more money in the next round, the county is not guaranteed to actually receive these funds.
From soon-to-be college students applying for college tuition assistance to charities looking to fund their mission, any time individuals or organizations request federal dollars, there is always a vigorous and competitive process to receive such aid. The amount of money Hinds County could receive when – or if – it actually applies in the spring may be even less than what the county thought it would secure this go-round, or worse, even none at all.
Based on preliminary data from WLBT Jackson, 429 cities and counties across the state applied for matching dollars, amounting to $435 million in requests. If all desired wants are met, hypothetically, only $15 million remains in the state’s ARPA water improvement fund.
The city of Jackson requested $35 million for work to improve the O. B. Curtis Water Treatment Plant, the facility that oversees Jackson’s water system. Jackson also plans to spend $27 to $35 million of its ARPA received on water upgrades. While the city of Jackson could potentially end up with nearly $70 million to spend on the water crisis, Hinds County will only be contributing a mere $17.5 million to the project, due to not even an attempt to obtain matching funds.
Administrator Jones said he is sure the county’s “strategy” will work in its favor though, eventually resulting in more money later than what could have been offered now. For the betterment of Jackson and Hinds County residents and the need for actually clean water one day, we sure hope so.
Amid the water crisis in Mississippi’s capital city, Jackson has denied its residents once again another basic public service – trash pickup.
Come Saturday, residents will not have garbage collection and will be forced to find other means of disposal. Instead of identifying a sensible solution for residents, Jackson leadership announced Thursday that people should reduce the amount of waste within each household and store seafood waste inside freezers. Residents do have the option to take their garbage to the city’s hazardous waste site, that is if they have the spare time or means necessary to do so.
Over 150,000 people will be affected by this – the same 150,000 who just endured an almost two-month water boil notice and several days without running water.
Jackson began contracting with Richard’s Disposal in April after the contract with the city’s previous disposal group, Waste Management, expired. After much dispute between Jackson Mayor Chokwe Lumumba and the city council, Lumumba issued an emergency contract to Richard’s Disposal, despite it not being approved by the council. The majority of the council wanted to reinstate Waste Management as the city’s service provider, but Lumumba was persistent on contracting with Richard’s due to the lower rates the company offered.
After six months of work, Richard’s Disposal has seen no compensation, and the company, rightly said they have had enough of Jackson’s incompetency. The company also is suing the city for the $5 million it should have received since work began.
Why does a capital city continue to see public needs stripped like this? That would be from poor leadership and elected officials who do not know the meaning of collaboration.
While Lumumba blames the city council for this fiasco, and vice versa, without a legal contract and funds for reimbursement, nothing will be solved for this garbage dilemma. Even though Richard’s has not been paid for its services, Jackson has still been collecting funds from residents for trash pickup, therefore even though the city has the means necessary to pay the company, it just has not done so.
The Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality said that it will fine the city up to $25,000 per day if trash begins to pile up on the side of the road, which could lead to even more debt and problems for Jackson.
So where do we go from here?
The only logical solution is for Lumumba and the city council to attempt to work together. One entity will have to swallow its pride and abandon its stance on who should cover the city’s sanitation and agree to contract with the alternative.
And this can be done. Just recently, Congress found bipartisanship with several legislative measures such as the Violence Against Women Act and a financial reform act for the United States Postal Service. If Congress can find ways to agree, so can a local government.
Councilman Kenneth Stokes, who had previously been against working with Richard’s Disposal, said Thursday he wants the residents to have their trash to be picked up however it needs to be done, so a solution could come sooner, rather than later for Jackson. We just need to hope for a municipal compromise.
Until then, Jackson residents will have to deal with the pungent odors, filthy streetscapes and old shrimp peelings stored in their freezers.