Two competing tax plans are being considered by the Mississippi legislature. The House plan, published in January and voted through already as HB1, offers to eliminate the state income tax. The Senate this week published their rival proposal.
Which of the plans is more conservative?
Speaker White’s House tax plan is without question the more conservative proposal. It offers full elimination of the state income tax over the next decade, a net $1.1 billion reduction in the amount of money the state government takes from taxpayers, and a cut in the grocery tax.
White’s plan is the product of careful deliberation and public consultation. White organized a public Tax Day, open to everyone. Rep Trey Lamar, who authored a lot of the detail, fielded all sorts of suggestions. The plan they produced reflects that collaboration and candor.
Delbert Hosemann’s Senate plan only offers a $330 million cut in the tax take. The Senate plan would leave politicians in control of a far larger share of your money – which a cynic might say is its purpose. The Senate plan was produced behind closed doors, only being unveiled halfway through the session.
The Senate plan should be seen as a deliberate attempt by anti-tax cutting politicians to try to head off Governor Tate Reeves / Jason White’s conservative tax cutting agenda. Hosemann’s tax plan would still leave the income tax in place, albeit at a reduced rate of 2.9 percent. The Senate plan would be to cut the grocery tax to 5 percent, rather than the 4 percent the House wants.
I'm not wild about the idea of any increase in the sales tax. What I don’t like about either plan is that they won’t just raise the gas tax, but they frontload that gas tax increase before the tax reductions kick in elsewhere. The House suggests raising the gas tax by 15 cents a gallon, while the Senate suggests 9 cents. If revenue needs to be raised to improve our roads, a more conservative approach might be to have time-limited taxes, with revenues earmarked for specific infrastructure projects.
That said, it would be disingenuous for any supporters of the Senate plan to attack the House plan from the right, given that the Senate is also proposing to increase the gas tax while continuing to tax your paycheck every month.
I worry that the Senate plan is primarily an exercise in political positioning, rather than income tax elimination. “Read my lips” I imagine those that drafted it want to be able to say “We support tax cuts! Here’s a token cut in the grocery tax, and a slightly lower increase in the gas tax. We’re not RINOs! Really”.
That kind of distraction strategy might once have worked if no one paid attention and the local media only ever criticize you from the progressive left. I’m not sure it will work anymore. If you posture as a tax cutter but put all your energy into a tax plan designed to dilute actual tax cuts, you will be called out.
Delbert Hosemann is reported as saying he believes full elimination of the income tax would be over ambitious. Since when was it “over ambitious” for Republicans with a super majority to get on and do conservative things?
I don’t see President Trump and Elon Musk holding back from doing what needs to be done because it is “over ambitious”. Our legislature needs to recognize that Mississippi has a historic political and economic opportunity to eliminate the state income tax. Mississippi is starting to see real growth, thanks in large part to the tax cuts we have already implemented. It is not a coincidence that when Arkansas cut their income tax rate, they set it at 3.9 percent in order to be just below our current rate of 4 percent.
Implementing the Senate plan, which would retain the income tax rate at 2.9 percent, rather than abolishing it, would make Mississippi less competitive than our neighbors. If passed, the Senate plan would squander the chance to deliver bold reform, while institutionalizing our economic uncompetitiveness.
Conservatives should support the House plan, with some possible modifications.
The news about Mississippi just keeps on getting better!
First, the Mississippi House passed a bill to allow public to public School Choice. Not far behind is a bill that would allow a form of public to private School Choice.
A few days before that, the House passed a proposal to eliminate the income tax. Then they went and passed a bill to repeal lots of protectionist red tape that restricts the healthcare economy in our state. They even found time to pass a bill to remove the absurd law that prevents adults in our state from buying wine online.
Even the Senate went and passed a bill that has the potential to stamp out Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) ideology in our public universities.
It would be premature to start celebrating these wins for freedom. Each of these bills still needs to be voted through by both chambers before heading to the Governor’s desk. But it is hard to think of a year in which at this stage in the legislative session the prospects of reform shone as brightly as they do today.
After years of seeing free market reforms killed by vested interests in committee, our lawmakers suddenly seem to be giving conservative voters conservative policies.
For decades, vested interests at the state Capitol were able to stifle change. This helps explain why Mississippi was often thought of as 50th out of 50 states. Perhaps it is time to think again?
As Governor Tate Reeves keeps pointing out, Mississippi has momentum. In the second and third quarters of last year, our state had one of the fastest growing per person incomes and per person outputs of any US state.
Yes, you read that right. Mississippi was one of the fastest growing states in America.
This new growth data might only be a snapshoot, rather than a trend. However, if our legislature really does pass all of the measures listed above, Mississippi will be on an upward trajectory for sure.
Of course, even as you read this, an army of lobbyists with their snouts in the Jackson trough are frantically trying to kill off these proposed changes.
The absurdly named “Parent’s Campaign” has gone into overdrive to try to prevent giving actual parents more choice. Fake conservatives are thinking up a hundred reasons why we cannot afford tax cuts. Those Tate Reeves calls the “coalition of the status quo” are trying desperately to keep things the way they are.
Perhaps most dangerous of all are those commentators who have spent years excusing inertia by implying that Mississippi can only manage to make one change at a time. We will hear plenty of fatuous arguments that the state legislature only has the bandwidth to implement change at a snail’s pace. Some will tell us that this is the Mississippi way. Nonsense. Never accept excuses for mediocrity.
If the state legislature in Arkansas and Alabama can cope with tax cuts, school choice and deregulation at the same time, so can we.
A great deal of the credit for this reformist momentum is due to Speaker Jason White and his cadre of conservative lawmakers. We must pray that the Speaker and his team hold their nerve. Let us cheer on Speaker White as he faces down the vested interests that want to hold Mississippi back. Let us call out the hypocrisy of the smug, self-satisfied anti-school choice activists that sent their own kids to private school. Playing nicely with such people never works, so don’t.
Real conservative lawmakers who want to see Mississippi grow can vote for these changes in the knowledge that we have a President and a primary base behind them all the way!
Our state is now completely surrounded! Tennessee has just passed an Education Freedom Act, meaning that every single surrounding state is a school choice state.
In Tennessee from 2025 families will be entitled to an education freedom scholarship worth $7,075. Capped to 20,000 low income families at first, the idea is that in a couple of years every family in the state can use their pot of money for tuition and fees at a public school or private school of their choice.
What about Mississippi? Are we in danger of being left behind by our bolder neighbors?
Every time there is any suggestion that families be allowed to have any control over even a tiny portion of the $14,676 that it costs to educate a child in the public system, there is an outbreak of outrage. Often those most vocally opposed to school choice have been wealthy liberals who sent their own kids to private school. None of the bills being considered in the Mississippi legislature this year offer anything as comprehensive as Tennessee’s Education Freedom Act.
There is, however, a very sensible bill offering a step towards more public-to-public school choice, HB1435. This bill would allow students in a public school to take their share of the education budget to a public school of their choice – if the recipient school has capacity.
Under the excellent leadership of Speaker Jason White, Rep. Rob Roberson and Rep. Jansen Owen, HB1435 is now out of committee and heading to a vote on the floor of the House. The bill still faces many obstacles, but it can no longer be quietly killed off. (See Texas primary elections for details).
A second bill, HB1433, would allow students in failing districts to take about $6,600 of their share of education funds to a private school. It would be similar to what our neighbors do, but for a handful of school districts.
With all our neighboring states on board with school choice, it would be absurd if even these modest steps towards school choice are derailed. Of course, even these modest proposals have generated the usual hysteria from the so-called “Parent’s Campaign”. Comically, the “Parent’s Campaign” describes a bill to allow parents more choice between public schools as “troublesome”.
Desperate to find a reason to oppose HB1435, they attack it on the grounds that it might require school districts to determine what their capacity is. Pesky parents, eh? Given what conservative leaders have now accomplished in every neighboring state and given the unequivocal support for school choice from President Trump, it will be interesting to see if any Republicans dare to vote against.
The White House just announced a roundtable on school choice with top Republican governors. The event, moderated by Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who spearheaded a major victory for school choice in her state after taking office, is an attempt to encourage pro school choice conservatives to move ahead with passing legislation.
Opposing school choice in Mississippi is probably not a great career move for any Mississippi Republicans. Nor is would it help raise standards in our schools.
Momentum is with parent power. This is a fight we can and must win.
Wow! What a start! Donald Trump began his Presidency with a blizzard of Executive Orders. He’s not holding back on advancing a conservative agenda. An emergency has been declared to secure the southern border. DEI hires in the federal government are being fired. The renewable energy boondoggle is over. Mass deportations have begun.
But what about Mississippi? Have our state lawmakers been using their time in office to deliver the change we need?
The good news is that two weeks into the 2025 legislative session there are some significant conservative bills at the Capitol under consideration.
SCHOOL CHOICE
HB1435 (Jansen Owen) offers public to public school choice. It would give every Mississippi family the choice options that last year the legislature extended to military families. HB1433 (Rob Roberson) would allow a limited form of public to private school choice in D and F rated districts. Shout out to Rep Owen and Rep Roberson! Both bills are vitally important, and we strongly support them. Also worth watching are bills to increase the number of Charter Schools and overhaul our phony district grading system.
INCOME TAX ABOLITION
The House has already passed HB1 (Rep Lamar, Speaker Jason White), which offers to eliminate the state income tax over the next decade. It would be truly awesome if this were to pass. There is an issue with the fact that the bill frontloads some tax rises early on, but I am confident that good conservatives can make this work. Kudos to Rep Lamar and Speaker White….
ANTI DIVERSITY, EQUITY & INCLUSION
SB2223 (Sen Hill), HB1179 (Rep Currie) and HB1416 (Rep Currie) offer comprehensive legislative action to address DEI. This is timely given that President Trump has just repealed Lyndon Johnson’s Executive Order mandating reverse discrimination. Also important is Sen England’s SB2182 bill, which would let sunlight in as an anti DEI disinfectant. Families would have a right to see what their kids are being taught in the classroom. Three cheers for Sen Hill, Rep Currie and Sen England!
BALLOT INNITIATIVE
There is also a bill in the Senate, SB2572, sponsored by Sen Boyd, to restore the ballot initiative. Well done, Sen Boyd. If you can make this happen, you will be a hero to many. Given that the Senate has been the place that efforts to restore the ballot initiative have usually gone to die, the fact that this has the sanction of some in the Senate might be significant. There is also a superb bill to reform Certificate of Need laws (HB922) by Rep Zuber and Rep Creekmore. A thousand cheers to both of them!
There are also some excellent proposals to allow Mississippians to buy wine online. It’s ridiculous we can’t already …
WILL ANY OF THIS HAPPEN?
These are all excellent conservative proposals, but we’ve been here before. Will our lawmakers make any of this happen? What has already happened to some of the anti DEI bills is instructive. Mississippi Lieutenant Governor, Delbert Hosemann, moved to kill Sen Hill’s anti DEI bill through a procedural sleight of hand. He did so by double referring the Hill bill, meaning that the chances of it progressing further are tiny.
Mr. Hosemann maneuvered to kill the anti DEI bill in Jackson the very week that President Trump issued Executive Orders to combat DEI in Washington.
Fortunately, lurking on the list of bills is a Senate bill (SB2515) called the REFOCUS bill (Sen Boyd). It proposes a long overdue review of our public universities, and it seems to include a section about tackling DEI. Or at least prevent public universities from maintaining a Diversity, Equity & Inclusion office.
We know that Ole Miss and others have already rebranded their Diversity departments, so the bill could just be symbolic. It might do nothing to counter leftist faculty, while allowing politicians to play word salad on SuperTalk. But depending on the language that Sen Boyd uses, her bill might actually be meaningful. This could be the kind of anti DEI bill we need.
Here at the Mississippi Center for Public Policy, we have built up a large audience across the state. Our weekly email goes out to over 80,000 people In Mississippi. Over the past week, more than ten million viewers across America and beyond saw our digital output.
As the House and Senate consider these conservative proposals in the weeks ahead, we will let you know who, like President Trump, has been actively on your side, and who continues to frustrate conservative reform.
How much do you imagine it costs to send a child to public school in Hinds County every year? $5,000 per year? Maybe $10,000? $15,000?
Actually, according to data from the Mississippi Department of Education, when you divide the number of students attending school by the total expenditure, in 2023-24 Hinds County spent $16,589 per student.
That is more than twice the average private school fees in our state. Indeed, $16,589 is not far off what it would cost to send your child to a top private school.
Now ask yourself if each child in Hinds County is getting a top education for that $16,589? Of course not. A large chunk of the kids can’t read or do basic math. One in three of them regularly skip school.
So, why not give families in Hinds County the right to take a portion of that $16,589 and allocate it to a school of their choice?
It’s not just Hinds County. The same question could be asked in Madison ($17,037 spent for every public school pupil per year) or Rankin ($15,198 per pupil per year), or Canton ($18,683) or De Soto ($13,820).
Even if you take the Department of Education’s own more conservative figure for per pupil spending (which includes all the ‘no-show’ students), Mississippi still spends an average of $14,676 per student.
Despite all that money, 4 in 10 fourth graders in Mississippi public schools cannot read properly. Eight in 10 eighth grade kids in Mississippi were not proficient in math in 2022. One in 4 kids routinely skips school.
Nor has $14,676 per student spending translated into better teacher pay. Notwithstanding recent pay increases, our teachers still earn significantly less than they did in 2010, when you adjust for inflation.
If you happen to be one of the fortunate families happy with the public education options available, great. No need to change and no one is proposing any changes that will affect you. But why not allow those families unhappy how things are the freedom to take their tax dollars to a school that best meets their needs?
Suggesting this provokes outrage not from parents, but from various vested interests who like things the way they are. They like a system that puts the $14,676 they get for your child into their administration budget, rather than the classroom. School superintendents making more than the Governor want to keep control of their multimillion dollar budgets for a reason. It’s a boondoggle for bureaucrats.
School Choice will not impoverish public schools. The legislation that Speaker Jason White is proposing would allow families control over the state portion of funding, not locally raised revenues or federal dollars.
In Hinds County, for example, that would mean families being able to allocate no more than $6,700 of the $16,589 overall per pupil funding. (Rather than depleting Hinds County public schools’ budget, actually it would make Hinds County better off in terms of per pupil spend.)
Giving families control over $6,700 of the state funds will not mean a flood of kids coming into your well run school district. Why not? Because the legislation proposed specifically gives school boards the final say on capacity.
What anti School Choice campaigners really fear is not the “wrong” kids coming to your school. What they fear is that you start wondering what the heck they’ve been doing with the $14,676 they get for your child or grandchild every year.
All of the arguments we are now hearing against School Choice in Mississippi have been heard in each of the surrounding states that have since adopted School Choice.
Alabama’s new Educations Savings Account program, which has just opened for applications, has been wildly oversubscribed. The program provides $7,000 funding per student attending a participating private school, while those enrolled in home education programs are eligible for $2,000 per student.
Arkansas allows all K-12 students access to an Education Savings Account from 2025, into which the state government pays the state portion of per pupil funding ($6,600 per year). Families will be able to use this $6,600 money they are given to pay for their child education, including private school tuition. Arkansas also allows public to public school transfers, allowing districts to define capacity.
Louisiana’s GATOR program starts in 2025-26 and establishes an Education Savings Account for those on low incomes, with the details are still being finalized as the law only recently passed. Louisiana already has public to public School Choice.
Texas and Tennessee, too, are at this very moment debating legislation that would create a universal Education Savings Account for families in those states, too.
None of the scare stories we now hear in Mississippi materialised in any of these neighboring states. None of these states has been bankrupted like the critics claimed by letting mom and dad have parent power. Instead, all the evidence suggests School Choice has started to improve education outcomes.
Another week, another massive investment project was unveiled in Mississippi. On Thursday, Governor Tate Reeves announced that a $10 Billion data center is coming to Meridian. One deal alone isn’t proof that the economy is taking off, but it does add to a pile of evidence suggesting that Mississippi could be on the cusp of a new era of growth. If Mississippi keeps going the way data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis suggests we are moving, this state won’t be 50th out of 50 for much longer.
Is it too far-fetched to imagine young people wanting to move to Oxford, Starkville, Laurel, or the Coast, the way they currently want to go to Austin or Nashville?
Encouraging, too, is Mississippi’s political leadership at the start of the new legislative session.
Income tax abolition, essential if we are to be competitive, is now the number one priority for the Governor and the Speaker, Jason White. School choice, the only sure fire way to improve education standards and prepare young people for the world of work, is on Speaker White’s priority list for this legislative session. Removing red tape, particularly as it restricts the healthcare economy, is also being actively considered, with the State Board of Health firmly committed to change.
These changes are essential if our state is to seize this once-in-a-generation opportunity. But even now the forces of inertia are trying to stop change. If they succeed, Mississippi will stall.
(Almost) everyone now says they support income tax elimination. Yet some are quite clearly only paying lip service to the idea, desperately seeking to avoid passing legislation this session that commits to actual elimination. At the same time, they talk up the idea of cutting the grocery tax as a deliberate distraction strategy, knowing full well that cutting the income tax would have vastly more impact.
While Mississippi considers school choice, we are surrounded by states that are actually doing it. Tennessee is in the process of passing the legislation this week. Yet the forces of inertia in Mississippi say we need more time to consider Education Savings Accounts. Really? Can you not look across the state line at Arkansas or Alabama to see how it is transforming education for the better? Perhaps your call for “more time” just an excuse?
Maybe, like the disgraceful School Superintendent in Madison County did this week, the forces of inertia circulate false claims about school choice? (No, public to public school choice does not take away local tax dollars, since it only involves the state portion of the budget. No, private schools do not lack accountability. They are more accountable than any public school.)
The sort of misleading claims made by the Madison School Superintendent are attempts to prevent change by those that think they, not pesky parents, know best for your child. The forces of inertia are also lobbying aggressively in the legislature to kill off reforms that will remove health care regulation that intentionally limits the number of providers. The truth is that for years all of those against lower taxes, less regulation and opposed to school choice in our state have been able to get their way. That is why Mississippi has not grown the way Alabama or Texas have. I’m optimistic that this time the forces of inertia can be overcome. Why?
Firstly, it is increasingly obvious that Mississippi could be doing things differently. You only need to look across the river at Arkansas under Sarah Huckabee Sanders (tax cuts, school choice, red tape removal), or Alabama (ditto), or at almost any southern state to see it. Secondly, Trump. The 47th President is committed to tax cuts, red tape reduction and school choice. This will help tilt opinion in our state.
Imagine for a moment that you are a local Republican party office holder keen to catch the eye of the new White House administration. Perhaps you want an appointment or some kind of endorsement? Do you really imagine Donald J. Trump would pick you out in such a crowded field if you have been anti-tax cuts? Do you honestly think Team Trump would say, “Yes, Mr. President, this local guy in Mississippi who killed off School Choice is our guy”? If nothing else, self-interest will move the dial towards the right agenda in Mississippi over the next four years.
Finally, I think inertia can be overcome because of Elon Musk.
Something weird has happened since Elon bought X / Twitter. Politics is now increasingly unfiltered. Even if you are one of a majority of folk that don’t use X, you will have felt the effect of this form of unfiltered politics. The forces of inertia can be petulant. They can lobby and bully to try to stop change. But they cannot any longer escape the consequences of trying to stop change. Cheer up! 2025 is going to be awesome. Mississippi is on the cusp a great change.
Did you know that Mississippi is now one of the fastest growing states in America? Only two states saw real GDP rise faster than it did here in the third quarter of 2024.
Were you aware that personal income in our state rose more here than almost anywhere in the US this past year?
New data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis shows that Mississippi is on the up.
For as long as anyone can remember, Mississippi has ranked 50th out of 50. Not for much longer, perhaps. According to this new data, ours’s was one of the top performing states in 2024. If we keep growing for the next few years the way we did in 2024, we won’t be bottom of the class for much longer.
Mississippi’s success is not an accident. It’s a consequence of a number of key free market reforms:
- Labor market deregulation, with an Occupational Licensing law in 2021.
- Tax cuts with legislation to cut the state income tax to a flat 4 percent in 2022.
- Further tax reform to make it more tax efficient for businesses in 2023.
- Education funding reform as a step towards school choice in 2024.
These reforms have begun to energize our state. They make it easier for people to get ahead, for businesses to invest, and for families to spend their income on their priorities. They draw in inward investment, which is changing our state for the better.
If Mississippi is not to lose this momentum, we need to go even further. That is why MCPP has just published a Blueprint for Mississippi – a list of the ten key reforms that would lift our state to the top of the economic table.
The number one reform we need to prosper is school choice. Why? School choice is the only way to be certain of raising standards. The better job we do of educating young people, the greater their chances of leading a prosperous, fulfilling life.
Our Blueprint sets out how we can accomplish school choice, giving every family in our state the choices that today only the very rich enjoy.
To prosper, our state needs less regulation and less government. Our Blueprint sets out proposals to cut taxes further and dismantle the costly, leftist bureaucracy that seems to be in control no matter who you vote for.
Decades of crony cartel politics has stifled innovation in our state. Years of lobbyists cutting cozy deals in the Capitol that commercially advantage their clients has held Mississippi back. A lot of the intentionally restrictive laws that limit health care provision simply need to go. Our Blueprint sets out how to make this happen.
MCPP has been a driving force behind many of the key free market reforms that have helped energize our state. But at every opportunity, crony cartel politics has tried to prevent change.
The crony cartel will try again. It’s what self-serving cartels do. Already they are mobilizing half-baked arguments against school choice. They are lobbying to maintain intentionally restrictive laws that hold back the healthcare economy. Brace yourself for politicians explaining why we can’t afford tax cuts despite a healthy surplus.
In politics, nothing moves unless it is pushed. MCPP won’t just publish our Blueprint. We will push and push hard. Mississippi’s future is too important to let bad politics get in the way.
Mississippi could be on the cusp of transformative changes. If we keep going, we will not only no longer be 50th, but we could become – like Tennessee or Alabama – a state that young people want to move to, not leave.
Download a copy of our blueprint here!
Remember when Japan was predicted to overtake America?
Back in the 1980s, Japan was the coming country. Japan’s economy had enjoyed decades of rapid growth. Her exports where everywhere, and with inventions like the Sony Walkman, it looked as though Japan was the technological future, too.
America looked like a power in decline. Forty years ago, many traditional US industries were failing. Crime seemed out of control.
By the mid 1990s, Japan’s GDP was 71 percent that of the US - and the gap looked to be closing. One “expert”, Herman Kahn predicted that Japan would surpass America as the world’s largest economy by 2000.
Today? Japan’s economy is a quarter the size of America’s. Japan hasn’t produced much innovation since the Tamagotchi (Don’t ask). Despite all the talk about Japanese electronic wizardry, the great digital innovations of the past few decades have happened on this side of the Pacific.
Today, of course, we’re told that the great ascending power is not Japan, but China. China’s economic growth over the past 40 years has been phenomenal. In industry after industry, Chinese exports have crushed the competition. China, unlike Japan, is not just an economic competitor but a strategic rival to the United States, pursuing an aggressively expansionist policy in the Pacific, south Asia and parts of Africa.
By 2021, China’s GDP was almost 80 percent that of the US and the experts were telling us China would overtake America within a couple of decades.
But look at what has happened since. China’s economy seems to have peaked as a percentage of US output. China has even more debt-induced malinvestment than Japan had during the 80s asset bubble.
Chinese demographics (current Total Fertility Rate 1.02) are in an even worse shape than Japan’s (TFR 1.30). And China’s fiscal position is unlikely to improve with all of President Xi’s imperial ambitions to fund.
As recently as 2008, Europe’s economy was about the same size as the United States’. Today, America’s economy is twice the size of Europe’s. Looking at the number of large companies established over the past 50 years on either side of the Atlantic. Home Depot, a single US company, eclipses all the new businesses created in the European Union since 1974.
So why are Japan, China and Europe all in their different ways underperforming America? Because each are, in their different ways, reverting back to a type of political economic tradition far less successful than America’s.
Japan, superficially Western in so many ways since 1945, has behind that façade a strongly corporatist political economy. A handful of well-connected conglomerates are able to dominate markets, but shielded from internal competition, they don’t innovate. (To appreciate how stifling this is, try to imagine what America might be like, for example, if IBM was the only computer company, with all the competitors kept out.)
China, after a brief move towards market liberalization begun by Deng Xiaoping, is reverting to what you might think of as a Ming tradition. Dissent is stamped on. A bureaucratic elite micromanages and controls. The sclerotic effects are already being felt.
Europe, repeated rescued from an indigenous form of autocracy by the Anglosphere powers (1704, 1815, 1914, 1944, Cold War), is tragically reverting to type. Today, a courtly elite enthroned in Brussels attempts to regulate and control ever more aspects of social and economic life across the Continent, destroying it in the process (Mercifully, Britain escaped from this in 2016 and might yet return to a more Atlantic tradition).
To flourish, the United States needs to stay true to the political and economic model envisaged by the Founders; limited government, lower taxes and liberty. The good news is that with the new administration in Washington, this may well be about to happen. Elon Musk is determined not only to cut federal spending (something America urgently needs to do to avoid bankruptcy). He is looking to turbo charge productivity growth, moving people from the public to the private sector, and radically cut red tape. Reports of America’s relative decline seem to me to be wildly exaggerated. If Musk and co deliver half of what they are promising, we might just be on the cusp of an extraordinary period of progress and innovation in America. The divergence between America and the rest of the world is only going to accelerate.
I feel an overwhelming sense of privilege to be onboard!
Imagine a world in which the President of the United States could prevent you from reading a story about incriminating emails found on his son’s laptop?
Actually, that’s what happened. When the New York Post ran a story about Hunter Biden’s laptop, administration officials put pressure on media outlets to prevent you from reading it.
Envision an America in which articles about the origins of Covid could be taken down by administration officials during the pandemic? You don’t have to imagine. That’s literally what they did.
If you are appalled at the prospect of powerful politicians trying to suppress awkward opinions, I suspect you’d be concerned at any attempts by some in our state to restrict debate and discussion on certain topics, too.
Unfortunately, some state officials seem to think they can bully organizations like MCPP in order to shut down what we say. This seems to be the case with school choice, an issue on which every conservative ought to agree. Some evidently don’t agree and are mad at us for promoting change.
MCPP is 100 percent committed to parental choice as the only certain way to raise standards and counter left- wing values in the classroom. We relish the opportunity to listen to those with different ideas and engage with those that have a different viewpoint.
Anyone is free to disagree with us. But no one that disagrees with our stance should ever try to shut down our advocacy the way Biden’s gang shut down the Hunter laptop story.
Here’s why we won’t be cowed.
First, it’s a question of credibility: MCPP is a conservative think tank. That means we’re cheerleaders for conservative policies, but not for any politicians.
To be sure, we probably agree 90 percent of the time with most elected state-wide officials. But when we disagree, we won’t hide the fact. Instead, we will do so openly, honestly and dispassionately (maybe even using a little humor from time to time ….) A think tank that shied away from asking state leaders questions that they’d rather not answer wouldn’t be worth a dime. Why would anyone take such an organization seriously?
Second, you are the media: Biden’s gang, like politicians down the ages, tried to bully media organizations into ignoring inconvenient stories. That tactic doesn’t work anymore since Musk set social media free.
Each week, MCPP reaches tens of thousands of folk across our state. We do so with published articles and media appearances. But the single biggest way we reach people is directly, the way I’m connecting with you now. Our email list has tens of thousands of subscribers, and a phenomenal open rate. This Wednesday, I uploaded a short video in the morning. By lunchtime it had been viewed 48,000 times. As of now, it’s been seen over 130,000 times – a high percentage in Mississippi. Thanks to Elon Musk’s X, we reach several million people every month, again many in Mississippi. Unless anyone has the power to shut down our social media operation, we are going to keep going.
Third, and most important, School Choice is right: School choice is, as President Trump has said, the civil rights issue of our time.
It's more than about school standards. The case for giving families control over their child’s share of tax dollars is moral. MCPP has outlined a three-step strategy to achieve universal school choice in our state. We are surrounded on three sides by conservative led states that have adopted school choice.
People are free to disagree with us. So, too, are state-wide officials who can vote against school choice or kill it in committee (like some did with the ballot initiative, and anti DEI legislation and much more besides). But equally organizations like MCPP are free to explain to the public who is supporting school choice and who is trying to kill it. We won’t be cowed.
Of course, what made the story about Hunter Biden’s laptop so explosive was not what was on the laptop. It was the realization as to what some were prepared to do to suppress stories they didn’t like. Nothing perhaps could be more ruinous the reputation of any politician.