Blog - Page 32 of 193 - Mississippi Center for Public Policy

"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

Those words spoken by Rev. Martin Luther King provide one of the best-known quotes in America's history. His phrase is as famous as anything Thomas Jefferson or Abraham Lincoln ever said.

King’s words resonate as powerfully anything Jefferson or Lincoln said precisely because they, too, are an appeal to the same principles upon which America was founded; that all Americans are created equal.

Today, however, Martin Luther King’s vision of America, and the Founding principles on which the Republic has been built, are under attack.

Instead of teaching us to judge fellow Americans according to the content of their character, a radical ideology, Critical Race Theory, is teaching Americans to see everything in terms of race.

Critical Race theorists hold that the United States is founded on racial supremacy and oppression. They reformulate the old Marxist idea that society is divided between the oppressors and the oppressed, replacing the class categories of bourgeoisie and proletariat with the identity categories of white and black.

This makes Critical Race Theory a deeply divisive ideology and an extremist one that seeks to overthrow America's existing social and economic order.

At the Mississippi Center for Public Policy, we have been leading the fight against Critical Race Theory. First, we published a report full of evidence, detailing the extent to which this ideology is being taught in our public education system.

We also produced a model piece of legislation to tackle Critical Race Theory. Our proposal to tackle Critical Race Theory is not just consistent with Rev. King’s vision of America. I believe it would give us a legal framework to help ensure America lives up to his ideal. Our proposed law is also consistent with a belief in freedom and liberty.

I am delighted to report that a bill on Critical Race Theory passed through the State Senate by a clear majority recently. The bill is due to be assigned to a House committee shortly, and it is the only bill that addresses Critical Race Theory currently under consideration.

It is absolutely essential that we recognize that it is not enough to pass a law to defeat Critical Race Theory. We need to explain to the rising generation of Mississippians what it is about America that makes this country so special.

For most of human history, people were not treated as individuals in possession of inalienable rights. Hierarchy and hereditary were seen as the natural order. America, which was founded on the principle that all are created equal, was one of the first societies in the world where people began to be defined in terms of individual rights instead.

To be clear, the Founding principles were often very imperfectly applied. America produced laws and leaders that often failed to live up to the Founding principles. But that is not to say that the principles on which America was founded were themselves flawed. They are not.

The principles on which America was founded cannot be bettered. As Calvin Coolidge put it 150 years after the Declaration of Independence, “If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. No advance can be made beyond these [principles]."

Our "woke" elites today seek to return us to the pre-modern idea of group rights, collective identity, and advancement by caste.

As Coolidge went on to warn, if anyone rejects the principles on which America was founded, the only direction in which they will take America is backward, “Those that wish to proceed in that direction cannot claim progress.”

How odd that today, Critical Race theorists call themselves progressives. If they prevail, they will take us back to a pre-modern past.

It is vital that we ensure that the rising generation in our state understands and appreciates why Critical Race Theory is so wrong and appreciates what makes America so exceptional.

This is a fight that we can win.

The average person would agree that incentives affect behavior, though governments seem to never take a hint when it comes to things like stimulus checks and extended unemployment benefits – People will quit working when you give them money to stay home.

A new report by the Foundation for Government Accountability covers Mississippi’s “economic comeback” following the ending of its expanded unemployment benefits.

“In early 2021, Mississippi was facing the worst labor shortage in state history. By May, Mississippi businesses had more than 84,000 open jobs across the state – a record high at the time. In fact, there were more open jobs than people looking for work. Meanwhile, nearly 80,000 Mississippians were still collecting unemployment benefits – more than 10 times as many as were on the program before the pandemic hit.”

Just as any “free money” would, the federal unemployment bonuses incentivized people to stay home, rather than to return to work. Individuals were collecting more in taxpayer-funded benefits than the average Mississippian earned in wages at a full-time job. With unemployment benefits paying people to stay home, unemployment hit a high, therefore employers struggled to fill open positions, resulting in the labor shortage high. Taxpayers were paying, roughly, a terrible $38 million in benefits each week.

On May 10, 2021, Governor Reeves announced that the state was ending the federal unemployment expansions. Following the announcement, work search activities immediately spiked, with Mississippi businesses hiring more than 72,000 workers in the month of June alone. This was the largest hiring spree in its history. One week after the expanded benefits expired, the costs of taxpayer-funded benefits plummeted to just $2.8 million.

“As one of the first states to opt-out of the federal bonus and expansions, Mississippi deserves credit for setting the stage for other states to follow suit, and for Congress to eventually end the expansions nationwide.”

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

(Jackson, MS): The Mississippi Center for Public Policy is working directly with the Mississippi Secretary of State's Office and other partner organizations to cut red tape entangling business, innovation, and progress in the Magnolia State.

The 29 by '29 Plan reviews regulations in categories and stages, looking at regulatory boards and agencies as the paradigm for analysis, this, in light of free market principles and empirical data.

"Mississippi has been held back by too much regulation and red tape," said President & CEO Douglas Carswell. "Our state is one of the most overregulated in America, and this explains why we have not grown. Reducing red tape will allow our state to prosper, and this is a vital new initiative to make our state competitive"

Nearly 25% of U.S. workers are impacted by occupational regulation. These regulations, especially licensing that requires workers to get government approval before they can earn a living, restrict opportunity, raise costs for consumers, and provide negligible safety benefits.

Mississippi Secretary of State Michael Watson recognizes the harmful effects of many of the regulations and aims to streamline the regulatory process. He plans to review all 29 of the state’s licensing boards and commissions by 2029 to modify or eliminate unnecessary regulations that do more harm than good.

Tech Policy Analyst Matthew Nicaud said, "The state's administrative code has over 117,000 regulatory restrictions, and we're proud to take part in this initiative to reduce these work-related burdens."

MCPP looks forward to working on a reduction in burdensome regulations, with the anticipation that reducing the heavy hand of government leads to greater prosperity.

For media inquiries, please reach out to Stone Clanton, [email protected].

The United States has seen a notable increase in home-based businesses in recent years. However, despite their potential to grow incomes and expand opportunities, many local regulations have hamstrung these businesses. The Mississippi House has a bill introduced to address these issues, thanks to the initiative of Representative Jansen Owen.

House Bill 917, the Home-based Opportunity Freedom Act, passed in the House of Representatives yesterday. The bill would both explicitly establish that arbitrary regulations and fees cannot single out home-based businesses.

As people harness the power of new technologies and leverage opportunities for growth, small business owners have been able to build home businesses that can provide supplemental or even primary income. In many cases, home businesses eventually expand and grow to full-scale operations with offices, warehouses, and dozens of employees.

In addition to the immediate benefits for small businesses, many of these small businesses eventually become mid-sized companies or even multi-billion dollar corporations. For example, Amazon, Hobby Lobby, Microsoft, Google, Dell, Disney, and a host of other large companies, started small in garages, houses, apartments, and dorm rooms.

Many local governments often wax eloquent about the need for economic growth and business expansion. Yet, those same governments often impose regulations that are a direct barrier to business even starting in the first place. The need for a friendly regulatory environment is stronger than ever before.

A study conducted by the Center for Growth and Opportunity at the Utah State University found that many cities and local governments have zoning laws, permit fees, and a tangle of other regulations that make launching a home-based startup all the more difficult. According to another report on the issue from the Cato Institute, 18 states have passed laws reducing such burdens on home-based businesses. Such laws have helped home-based business models ranging from music lessons to cottage food sales.

Mississippi does not have a law protecting home businesses, and the effects have shown. For instance, the City of Jackson prohibits any increase in traffic due to a business being in the home. Thus, an increase in traffic caused by customers picking up cottage food could be viewed as a violation of the rules. The city also prohibits a home business from having any employees other than family members. Could this prohibit an attorney working from home from hiring a paralegal or a real estate broker to hire a secretary? A plain reading of the rules would conclude that both scenarios have a prohibition as well.

But Jackson does not stand alone with burdensome regulations. The City of Ridgeland has a rule that a home business may not occupy more than 25 percent of the total floor area of a home. This begs the question of why the arbitrary 25 percent number was the standard (as opposed to 20 percent or 30 percent). In the City of Nettleton, home businesses are not permitted to have more than five customers per day. In the City of Tupelo, there is an explicit prohibition on any mechanical work from home, such as small engine repair. The City of Cleveland states that "the dwelling floor plan shall remain unaltered from that appropriate with a household." However, the city has no specific definition of what would be "appropriate with a household," which makes enforcement arbitrary. In addition to these specific regulations, many cities also have an extensive application and permit process for home-based businesses.

The time has come for Mississippi to remove such arbitrary restrictions. According to 2016 pre-pandemic data from the Small Business Administration, approximately 50 percent of all small businesses were already home-based. In the wake of greater familiarity with working from home brought on by the pandemic, in conjunction with many starting their own businesses, the evidence suggests that these numbers have only increased since the pandemic. It's time for Mississippi to step up to the plate and enact policies to protect home-based businesses from excessive local regulations. It should not be a crime or a privilege to practice entrepreneurship in your home. This legislation would ensure that Mississippians are protected from government intrusion as they pursue opportunities through home-based businesses.

When our clients' constitutional rights are being violated and the political branches of government refuse to act, we take their fight to the courts. And we come to win.

That’s what state regulators are learning right now in our lawsuit challenging Mississippi’s Certificate of Need (CON) laws and home health ban.

Our client is Butch Slaughter, a physical therapist who owns a clinic in south Jackson. When COVID arrived, many of his patients stopped coming in. Even today, many are reluctant to come and cancellations are routine. He also knows that elderly patients need physical therapy now more than ever, as many seek to delay or prevent the need to receive care in nursing homes, which have been prone to outbreaks.

So, Butch had a simple idea: he would open a home health agency so that he could provide care to patients in the comfort and privacy of their own homes.

But it wasn’t so simple. It turns out that opening a home health agency in Mississippi is illegal, and has been for 40 years. Not because they are unsafe – several other home health agencies are operating in the state. Rather, they are illegal because the state government says more aren’t “needed.”

Translation: the government is shielding existing home health businesses from competition. This, despite the fact that the demand for home health services has at least tripled since the state decided there was no more “need.”

Even if this ban were lifted, Butch would still have to apply for CON before he could open. His competitors would then get to drag him into court and make him spend tens of thousands of dollars to try to prove his business was “needed.”

Imagine if we had told Netflix they weren’t “needed” because we already had Blockbuster.

This racket doesn’t just affect Butch. It hurts all of us. If you have ever had to travel to find quality care or paid exorbitant prices for mediocre care: it’s likely that health care CON laws were to blame.

Multiple bills have been introduced to remove the home health ban and CON requirement, but the state legislature has taken no action. So Butch teamed up with the Mississippi Justice Institute, and we sued.

In response to our claims that these laws violate Butch’s constitutional rights, the government argued that our lawsuit should be dismissed out of hand because our claims weren’t even plausible. But recently, the federal judge overseeing the case disagreed and allowed the lawsuit to proceed.

In his order denying the motion to dismiss, the judge notes that “It is no secret that significant financial interests are at stake when it comes to CON laws.” He explained that “Rent-seeking businesses make a sort-of ‘extra-legal’ contract with politicians: money and votes for the politicians, regulations that ensure a monopoly for the interest group. Meanwhile, consumers lose out. Without the market competition that normally regulates businesses’ behavior, the monopoly can charge otherwise unsustainably high prices for otherwise unsustainably mediocre products.”

In other words: pure cronyism.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that Butch will succeed in having the laws struck down. But it does mean the government will actually have to defend the laws in court. At the Mississippi Justice Institute, we are looking forward to that fight.

In Liberty,

Aaron Rice
Director, Mississippi justice Institute

One of the most irritating problems in Mississippi’s healthcare sector is the Certificate of Need (CON). A CON is a legal document required before proposed acquisitions, expansions, or creations of healthcare facilities are allowed. They can be issued by a government regulatory agency with authority over an area to affirm that the plan is “required to fulfill the needs of a community.” If it doesn’t, then the entity applying will not be allowed to continue their business. Does that not sound like central planning (i.e., the Soviet Union)?

While socialism is not equivalent to a planned economy, a key aspect of the ideology involves the replacement of a market system with some form of central planning in order to achieve coordination of the economy. The goal of such a system would be to achieve conscious control over the economy to prevent surplus, inflation, rising prices, etc. While this sounds like a nice idea, of course, we know this doesn’t work. The same can be said for CON laws.

Several factors spurred the U.S. Government (which later backtracked and got out of the CON business, as they saw it didn’t work) and states to require CONs in the healthcare industry. Chief among these was the concern that the excessive establishment of healthcare facilities would cause competitors in an oversaturated field to cover the costs of a diluted patient pool by unnecessarily diagnosing procedures and hospital stays, thereby overcharging. The problem is that you cannot – just like an economy – predict markets for goods and services. People should be free to operate a healthcare facility (and any other business, for that matter) and people should be able to freely choose if they want to use that healthcare facility, or not. It's just that simple and just that moral.

Numerous studies have shown that CON laws do not live up to their original goals, but instead – just as Soviet planning led to low-quality products and other negative outcomes – decrease access to healthcare, increase costs for consumers, and limit competition.

In 2016, the Federal Trade Commission and the U.S. Department of Justice issued a joint statement, concluding, “CON laws, when first enacted, had the laudable goals of reducing healthcare costs and improving access to care. However, after considerable experience, it is now apparent that CON laws can prevent the efficient functioning of healthcare markets in several ways that may undermine those goals. First, CON laws create barriers to entry and expansion, limit consumer choice, and stifle innovation. Second, incumbent firms seeking to thwart or delay entry or expansion by new or existing competitors may use CON laws to achieve that end. Third, CON laws can deny consumers the benefit of an effective remedy following the consummation of an anticompetitive merger. Finally, the evidence to date does not suggest that CON laws have generally succeeded in controlling costs or improving quality.”

At the Mississippi Center for Public Policy, we are fighting against this socialist-like mandate by advocating for the repeal of the state's Certificate of Need law, as well as the 40-year-old moratorium set on the issuance of new certificates for home health agencies, which the Mississippi Justice Institute has recently made great progress on. Especially, at a time when we need more healthcare providers than ever, we should make it easier for them to operate and easier for patients to receive care.

As the 2022 Mississippi Legislative Session continues, you can keep up with measures to expand healthcare in a truly free market way by watching our Legislative Tracker.

The United States has seen a notable increase in home-based businesses in recent years. However, despite their potential to grow incomes and expand opportunities, many local regulations have hamstrung these businesses. The Mississippi Senate and House both have bills introduced to address these issues, thanks to the initiative of Senator Daniel Sparks and Representative Jansen Owen.

According to 2016 pre-pandemic data from the Small Business Administration, approximately 50 percent of all small businesses are home-based. In the wake of greater familiarity with working from home brought on by the pandemic, in conjunction with many starting their own businesses, the evidence suggests that these numbers have only increased.

In addition to the immediate benefits for small businesses, many of these small businesses eventually become mid-sized companies or even multi-billion dollar corporations. Amazon, Hobby Lobby, Microsoft, Google, Dell, Disney, and a host of other companies started out small in garages, houses, apartments, and dorm rooms.

Despite all of the potential behind home-based businesses, the need for a friendly regulatory environment is stronger than ever before. A study conducted by the Center for Growth and Opportunity at the Utah State University found that many cities and local governments have zoning laws, permit fees, and a tangle of other regulations that make launching a home-based startup all the more difficult.

Such regulations have included local ordinances against home-based businesses having employees, bans on customers coming to the home, and commercial building requirements. According to another report on the issue from the Cato Institute, 18 states have passed laws reducing such burdens on home-based businesses. Such laws have helped home-based business models ranging from music lessons to cottage food sales.

The bills in the legislature would accomplish such protections in Mississippi. Senator Daniel Sparks' Home Business Relief Act and Representative Jansen Owen's Home-based Opportunity Freedom Act would both explicitly establish that arbitrary fees and regulations cannot single out home-based businesses.

It's time for Mississippi to step up to the plate and enact policies to protect home-based businesses from excessive local regulations. It should not be a crime or a privilege to practice entrepreneurship in your home. This legislation would ensure that Mississippians are protected from government intrusion as they pursue opportunities through home-based businesses.

The Mississippi Center for Public Policy approves of this legislation and will continue to update you as the 2022 Mississippi Legislative Session continues, and you can keep up with measures by watching our Legislative Tracker.

It would be an understatement to say that the number of regulations in Mississippi is immensely high. But Senator Kevin Blackwell has introduced legislation to proactively lower that number. Senate Bill 2162 would require several state agencies to repeal two regulations for every new regulation.

While many regulatory reforms have addressed regulatory burdens in certain areas, policies have seen success in other states due to the numerical nature of the reform. While certain reforms that single out specific regulations are laudable, this legislation is unique in that it addresses the bigger picture behind regulatory burdens as a whole.

A study by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University found that there are “117,558 restrictions and 9.3 million words. It would take an individual about 518 hours—or almost 13 weeks—to read.” Such regulations have been brought about over several decades, with some dating back to the 1950s.

While such a gargantuan number of regulations can seem daunting, regulatory excesses have been tackled before using policies similar to SB2162. In 2017, the Trump Administration incorporated a similar “one-in-two-out” policy and other reforms with the aim to reduce federal regulations. According to a report from the Heritage Foundation, these reforms led to reduced regulatory burdens and saved the American economy billions of dollars in regulatory costs.

The same is true on a state level. While individual repeals of such regulations can be extremely helpful in many cases, Mississippi needs an overhaul of its entire regulatory system that is based upon empirical data and facts. As the state of Mississippi turns the page into the 2020s, it is time for any new regulations to start clearing away old regulations. In addition, Blackwell’s legislation does not just replace old regulations with new ones. There is a 1:2 ratio for the number of new regulations versus the reduction in existing regulations. The time has come for Mississippi to do some regulatory clean-up and clear away the tangle of regulations that have built up over the years and threaten to clog economic growth. Senator Blackwell is to be commended for introducing this legislation that could serve as a real catalyst for regulatory reduction and economic prosperity.

Too many Mississippi kids are missing out on a good education. Our state has some of the worst outcomes in primary and secondary education in America.

Despite certain counter claims by those within the education bureaucracy that the outlook has been improving, if you measure the academic performance of Mississippi students in terms of ACT scores, things have not been getting better. In fact, the Covid crisis is likely to have made things even worse.

So, what can we do about it? Quite a lot, actually.

Our new report out this week, Transforming Mississippi Public Education, proposes a series of key reforms that are needed if we are to give Mississippi students a better standard of education.

We all know that many Mississippi school districts have been underperforming for years. But until now, every time that this gets pointed out, the conversation moves on to money. If only there was more funding, we are constantly told, things would be better.

Our report shows that the problem is not a lack of funds. Over the past twenty years, real spending per student has increased by a quarter, and over the past thirty years, per student spending has risen about 60 percent. The trouble is that there has been nothing like a 60 percent improvement in standards.

The problem is not a lack of funding, but rather what the education system does with the money they have.