close

The technology sector carries some of the highest-paying salaries in the market. Technology workers bring immense potential to state economies with their high-value skills and abilities to drastically increase productivity. Mississippi is in a position to attract tech sector workers and jobs.

Software developers, network engineers, data scientists, web developers, and other tech workers bring unique skills that are becoming more and more critical to the modern economy. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, tech workers produce approximately 18 percent of the United States GDP.

Areas with these high-income tech workers stand to benefit from their incomes. More money in the economy leads to more spending, saving, and investment in a state. Many might think such technology jobs have the highest salary potential almost exclusively in big technology hubs such as Silicon Valley and New York City.

However, the data suggests otherwise. According to Visual Capitalist, Mississippi ranks among the top ten states in the country regarding the income difference between tech workers and workers in other sectors. This places tech workers as some of the most in-demand earners in the state.

While some areas may offer numerically higher tech salaries than Mississippi, their higher cost of living makes it less attractive to live in these areas. To put this in perspective, the average tech salary in Mississippi is $71,720. While California’s tech workers have an average salary of $116,820, the raw numbers themselves don’t tell the whole story. The average tech salaries in Mississippi are indeed numerically lower than in states like California that have more urban centers. But many factors may actually put Mississippi tech workers in a better financial position than their counterparts in California or New York.

Much of the salary differences are due to the higher cost of living in many states compared to Mississippi. For instance, a dollar in Mississippi has 33 percent more purchasing power than a dollar in California, based on data from the Tax Foundation. In fact, a dollar in Mississippi has more purchasing power than anywhere else in the country. This gives the state a competitive advantage as a place of residence for tech workers seeking a lower cost of living.

Furthermore, in the wake of expanded opportunities for remote work, many tech workers now have the option to earn high-paying salaries from companies based in tech hubs like Silicon Valley while avoiding the high cost of living. Workers are doing this by having their actual residence in lower-cost states.

When such workers come to Mississippi, they bring their knowledge and abilities to Mississippi. While some may continue to work remotely for out-of-state companies, evidence suggest that many also use their skills to start their own startups and create more tech jobs in the state.

Tech job listings in tech hubs like New York and San Fransico have not seen drastic increases. On the other hand, many cities with traditionally smaller tech ecosystems have increased their tech job listings as new startups come about from the Silicon Valley exodus. In the second quarter of 2021, several such cities saw tech job listing increases. This would include Richmond (68 percent increase), Salt Lake City (33 percent), San Antonio (32 percent), Cincinnati (29 percent), and others. Exceptional tech startup growth has happened in the cities of other states. So why can’t we see the same thing happen in Mississippi?

As the state continues to look for avenues to attract talent, the tech sector's future in Mississippi carries the dynamic potential for new startups and high-paying jobs to grow the economy. The state could see a real increase in tech-driven growth by enacting policies that lower taxes, promote safer streets, lower regulation, and promote prosperity. In the friendly competition among states to attract tech talent, Mississippi should rise to challenge and take these steps to make the state a more attractive place for the free market. Tech sector growth will be sure to follow.

The City of Jackson took over a year to provide public records to WLBT, a local news outlet that requested the records under Mississippi’s public records laws. Those laws require public records to be provided within seven business days. The city’s egregious delay will cost it and its residents in a big way. Last week, the state’s Ethics Commission ordered Jackson to pay more than $170,000 in legal fees to WLBT – the largest fee award ever levied against a government entity by the commission.

WLBT filed an ethics complaint against the city in October 2019, after the city failed to respond or responded exceedingly late to seven requests for public records to the Jackson Police Department for crime statistics, emails, memos, and related documents.

The city failed to respond to five of the seven requests. For the other requests, the city took excessively long to provide the requested records. For example, the city took nearly 600 days to produce a portion of the phone and text logs WLBT requested from JPD Chief James Davis.

Even after the ethics complaint was filed, the city still did not produce any additional records for 10 months.

The ethics complaint resulted in a hearing before the Mississippi Ethics Commission in November 2020. Nine witnesses appeared before the commission, mostly current and former city employees. On August 6, 2021, the Ethics Commission voted unanimously to approve a final order against the city of Jackson. The order requires the city to pay $170,397.50 to reimburse WLBT’s legal expenses and also fined the city an additional $900 for nine separate violations of state law.

The order also mandates that Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba take several measures to ensure the city does not violate the Public Records Act in the future, such as designating public records officers for the city and each of its 10 departments. Those officers must also undergo at least two hours of training on the Public Records Act each year from a curriculum approved by the commission’s executive director, Tom Hood.

Additionally, the city will be required to post weekly reports on Jackson’s website showing all pending requests for public records to promote transparency.

“The commission and its hearing officers have given the city more than enough warnings and guidance, more than enough chances to comply. Yet the city and its elected officials and, therefore, its employees, have continued to ignore the law and persistently failed to meet legal obligations with no reasonable explanation,” Hood wrote.

The Public Records Act provides a fine of up to $100 per violation, and also allows the Ethics Commission to impose reasonable expenses against government entities who have Complaints filed against them.

A frustration often expressed by advocates of government transparency is that the Ethics Commission rarely imposes significant costs against violators, and the $100 fine, by itself, amounts to a meaningless slap on the wrist.

For that reason, while it’s unfortunate that Jackson’s taxpayers will have to foot the bill for the city administration’s deliberate indifference to state law, last week’s historic fee award is welcome news for those who believe that government must be honest, transparent, and accountable to its citizens, and should face real consequences when it fails to do so.

Facts don’t have to answer to anyone. But is this true in our day when Big Tech social media is the established forum of public discourse? If one were to use the Big Tech content labels and fact checks as the ultimate arbitrators of truth in the public square, the facts would change almost daily. Unfortunately for Big Tech, facts don’t answer to anyone, not even the experts.

At the beginning of 2020, the news of a strange, new, deadly virus that originated in Wuhan, China went out like shockwaves across the globe. Almost immediately, the social media scene became abuzz with millions of voices reacting to the news of a virus that would threaten their health, jobs, futures, and very lives.

As reports began to flow out of China that the virus had possibly originated through a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, social media began circulating this possibility. But before the public discourse got too carried away with a free discussion of the virus origins, social media fact-checkers decreed in early 2020 that such conversations contributed to misinformation and banned any user that purported such a view. The experts had spoken, and those who dissented would be silenced.

After summarily declaring that the Wuhan lab leak theory was so untrue that it could not even be spoken of, Big Tech platforms such as Facebook, had a policy change several months later. The experts had spoken again. This time they determined that now the lowly rank-and-file Americans should be permitted to discuss the lab leak theory that it would have been dangerous for them to discuss only months before.

Granted, these are private sector companies that enact social media censorship. But the massive size, liability protections, and political connectedness of Big Tech call into the question whether or not Big Tech companies have control over public discourse that has grown beyond the proper extent of the private sector. Indeed, many of these private sector moderators have a power over public discourse that sometimes carries a greater sway than even the government itself.

However, such power in Big Tech hasn’t kept the influence of big government out of content moderation. For instance, in the case of the Covid lab leak theory, social media executives communicated directly with government bureaucrats to determine what content to remove. Such actions turned the content moderators into the government’s proxy henchman. As if this were not enough, some have advocated for Big Tech to be formally and legally directed to take down posts that the government considers misinformation.

Is this censorship at the bidding of “the experts” truly the type of public discourse that America can thrive in? We live in a day in which there is widespread civil disagreement on issues ranging from immigration to Covid, and from critical race theory to gun control. Just about every party has the same facts to work with, but many come to differing conclusions. Yet, for practically every issue, there is an “expert” who attempts to establish the acceptable narrative.

America has a long heritage of open discussion and debate of facts under the microscope of the public square. While censorship and the tyranny of the experts might be the status quo in some societies, there are few things more dangerous to a free-thinking society. Those at the top must not control the state of public dialogue.

Facts and ideas are the currency of civil discourse. The powers that be should not leverage their clout to suppress the open and robust discussion of the facts. This is America. Every thinking person should be permitted to civilly discuss and review the facts before them. Such an environment is critical for free-thinking citizens to draw their own conclusions about the pressing questions that confront our nation -without Big Tech censorship and the tyranny of the experts.

Individuals should be skeptical whenever the welfare state is invoked. As a general principle, because the government is funded using other people’s money, it can be highly prone to inefficiency and waste. But it can be hard to measure how far the inefficiency goes. This is especially true of the welfare system.

The cost of fighting the War on Poverty is very hard to quantify because it has been fragmented into a myriad of programs. Some of these programs may aid in certain cases. However, the government’s general approach to welfare is to simply pump money into such programs with the hope that some of them will work. This is a problem. 

For example, last year, it was revealed through a 104-page audit that nearly $94 million in welfare money was spent in ways that were not above board through the Mississippi Community Education Center.

This included hiring lobbyists without describing the work they were set out to do, making lump-sum payments to family members of agency directors (in some cases totaling over $1 million), and spending welfare funding on projects that have nothing to do with welfare. There were even instances of funds being used for college football tickets. This has constituted what some have considered Mississippi’s largest embezzlement scandal. 

However, this goes beyond merely the misappropriation of funds. In 2018, the most recent year of reliable data, Mississippi ranked 10th in how much money is spent on healthcare, allocating 76.6 percent of its health budget to public welfare. Per resident, the state of Mississippi spent approximately $2,561. Yet, Mississippi remains one of the poorest states in the country and contains among the highest number of residents dependent on welfare. 

Continually pumping money into systems that have already proven to be ineffective is not good policy. Instead, good policy is driven by a trajectory of good leadership and principles that keep in mind that the government works for the people. 

If the welfare state is incapable of stewarding taxpayer dollars in a manner that is honest and efficient, then there really is no justification for taking those funds from taxpayers in the first place. 

Robert Rector and Vijay Menon of the Heritage Foundation even strengthen this concept as they single out cutting wasteful and directionless spending as one of the biggest ways of bettering our welfare system as a whole. If the government is going to get involved, make sure it has a workable plan. 

The citizens of Mississippi ought to consider if the state’s welfare system has truly improved their way of life. If it has not, as the data suggests, then perhaps it’s time for meaningful change. Viewed as a whole, the current state of welfare programs demonstrates that individuals are the ones best equipped to take hold of their livelihoods. As the legendary Ronald Reagan quipped, “the most dangerous words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’” 

The Centers for Disease Control recently announced a moratorium on evictions across most of the United States, in light of Covid. This order places restrictions on evictions in areas with high or moderate levels of Covid infections.

This move has been applauded by some as a way to stabilize housing and help those who are struggling financially due to Covid. But the evidence speaks directly to the contrary. The government imposing its control over rental properties is highly problematic, with repercussions for both tenants and property owners.

A policy that forces property owners to provide temporary housing without recourse during Covid is not too dissimilar from the government handing out checks that are encouraging people not to work. According to the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the median rent in the United States is $909 a month, slightly lower than the median mortgage of $975. Consider the following statistics:

While some might view these facts as good news for tenants, it ultimately leads to bad outcomes. Indeed, without having the recourse of eviction in the event of non-payment, many landlords are raising their approval criteria. On this factor alone, it will likely be harder for the tenants who didn’t pay rent during the moratorium to get approved by future landlords if they chose to go to a different rental home post-pandemic. 

Thus, a ban on evictions for the failure to pay rent is ultimately just another piece of the puzzle that encourages Americans not to work and causes collateral effects as well. The only difference is that instead of the federal government using taxpayer dollars to write checks, property owners are forced to foot the bill until the moratorium is over and they can get their rent payments back.

This places many property owners at great financial risk if rental properties are not bringing in income. Approximately half of all rental units are owned by small investors, referred to by HUD as “mom and pop landlords.” The average rental property owner receives 31 percent of their annual income from their rental properties. With so many small business owners already struggling, such a dip in income has led to even more financial hardship, leading to increased debt and even rental property foreclosure.

Government interference in the economy has a consistent track record of generally causing more problems than it solves. The government’s recent move hurts tenants and property owners in untold ways. Only time will tell what the major repercussions will be from such government overreach.

Attacking our recently published Fat Cat Report, the Columbus Dispatch invoked Babe Ruth. Curiously, they cite the fact that a legendary baseball star was once paid a lot of money to justify the soaring salaries of education bureaucrats in Mississippi today.   

Babe Ruth was indeed once handsomely paid. But he was paid a lot because he possessed rare talents, for which there was tremendous demand. It isn’t quite so obvious what rare talents many of our school district superintendents on six-figure salaries have. 

Babe Ruth famously justified being paid more than the US President on the basis he’d “had a better year.” The same can hardly be said of the school superintendent in the Dispatches’ own Columbus district. Despite the superintendent getting $150,000, the school district was D-rated. 

The Dispatch insists that school superintendent salaries are market-driven and competitive.  Really? If such salaries were market-driven why was F-rated Holmes County’s superintendent paid $170,000, while A-rated Lafayette county’s school superintendent was paid $42,000 less?   

How does a competitive salary process explain the fact that the superintendent of Corinth’s district with 2,645 students enrolled was paid $210,000, while Jackson Public School district with over ten times the number of students was paid $39,000 less? 

The Dispatch suggests that our report hurts Mississippi’s image.   

No, what really harms our state are cozy cartels running public services without accountability to the public, and local newspapers doing nothing to expose the consequences. 

The Dispatch suggests that our report is “another attack on K-12 education.” 

Perhaps what really harms public education are underperforming education bureaucrats, who are able to carry on presiding over mediocrity as some in the local media look the other way. 

The Dispatch glibly dismisses our finding that dozens of education bureaucrats are paid more than the State Governor on the grounds that it has been this way for decades. So why has the Dispatch not exposed the fact? What have they been doing for all those years as top public sector salaries soared, but teachers’ pay stagnated? It’s hardly Woodward and Bernstein when it comes to holding the powerful to account, is it?  

The Dispatch claims that we are calling for “state-level approval for any local school district salary that exceeds that of the governor.’  Nowhere in our report do we propose that.   

What we do suggest is that “parents living within the School District should have the power to trigger a public vote at the board meeting to confirm or reject any portion of the salary over and above that of the State Governor.”   

Having attacked our report for calling some officials ‘fat cats,’ the Dispatch criticizes our report for not calling others ‘fat cats.’  If you read our report, we take care to say that not every highly paid official is a fat cat. We present the facts and compare what top officials are paid to what teachers, nurses, state troopers, and average Mississippians make. We let the reader decide who deserves their salaries, just as we believe the public has a right to know what public officials are paid.   

In our report, we make it very clear that our report does not cover university salaries, which lie outside its scope. In their haste to attack, the Dispatch uses this omission against us. Perhaps if they had spent a few minutes researching the topic, they would have discovered that university pay was the subject of a very detailed 50-page report we produced last year. 

Perhaps one fact that we did not include in our report but should have is that the per-person income in Columbus, where the school superintendent was paid $150,000 a year, is less than $25,000.   

Public interest journalism should have no problem in pointing that out, and certainly not attack those that do. 

We think most folk in Columbus and Lowndes County would agree. 

Mississippi is ripe with economic opportunity. With abundant natural resources, two deepwater ports, a low cost of living, and a central location to much of the nation, there is ample potential for growth.

Before the 2000s, Mississippi ranked 14th in economic growth at 2.1 percent. However, this growth has slowed. How can Mississippi get back on track?

Private sector growth carries the greatest potential for state economies, with private-sector job growth being one of the key measurements for economic growth. But in Mississippi, state and federal government have taken the helm as the top sectors in the state. Altogether a poor job has been done in cultivating an environment that promotes economic growth.

The Clarion Ledger reports that in Mississippi, federal, state, and local government spending amounts to 55 percent of the economy. This is the fifth-highest percentage in the nation. This is not an environment that breeds growth. To get Mississippi back on the map economically, limited government and free-market capitalist principles should take the forefront by reducing the government’s size and spending.

According to a study conducted by the Legatum Institute, Mississippi has failed to achieve satisfactory standards of prosperity, especially when compared to other states throughout the United States.

Mississippi has consistently ranked in the ten lowest states over the last ten years in terms of economic quality. This is considering factors such as financial stability, productivity and competitiveness, dynamism, and labor force engagement.

Mississippi’s economic situation has caught national attention as the US News and World Report has similarly ranked it and neighboring states at the lowest in the United States. Many local economies have experienced no growth as employment opportunities, and major industries have dwindled in size. In addition, limited educational resources have made the possibility of innovation stagnant.

The Daily Journal estimates that 19.6 percent (nearly one out of every five residents) of the Mississippi population live below the poverty line. This is the highest poverty rate in the country.

But there is an exciting tomorrow for Mississippi if the right steps are taken. The near future of the state is promising as it leaves the world of Covid. The state’s gross domestic product is expected to rise by 2.8% this year. Such growth has not been seen since before the Great Recession; however, it is expected to plateau within the next few years.

This does not need to be the case. If policy makers want to change the trajectory of their state, it might be time to harness this economic momentum and give the opportunity for economic growth back to the citizens of the state.

Economic growth can only occur if government refrains from drowning it. If the state wants more available capital, encouraging the private sector to grow through tax cuts and regulatory reform, could effectively lower poverty levels -this just might be a better strategy than expanding the government sector.

Before Mississippi blindly accepts the checks flowing from the politicians and bureaucrats of Washington as benevolent gifts from Uncle Sam, it is vital to scrutinize federal monies that include conditions to bring problematic federal policies to our state.

It’s no secret that the federal government has expanded its spending at exponential levels in recent years. Much of this spending has gone to the states in the form of grants and direct payments, while other funding proposals are built into state programs with a combination of state and federal oversight, such as Medicaid. 

Granted, there are several key channels that the federal government uses to distribute monies to the states. Many of these channels are perfectly legitimate functions that reflect the normal processes of a federal system of government. 

For example, states are not constitutionally expected to provide for their military security independently. In light of this, the federal government provides adequate funding to build military bases and other defense assets.

One could also argue that because the federal government has jurisdiction over interstate commerce, it should additionally provide a sizeable portion of the major road infrastructure funding. But what about the myriad of other federal funding mechanisms that trickle down money to states like Mississippi?

According to the Mississippi Office of the State Auditor, the Mississippi state government had $10.1 billion in federal funding expenditures for the fiscal year in 2020. To put this into perspective, the total Mississippi general fund receipts for the 2020 fiscal year derived from state-based taxes were approximately $5.6 billion. The influence of federal funding is far-reaching and carries a large portion of the government funds that flow through the state. 

Of the billions of dollars and federal funding, much of it is not subject to direct oversight from the state legislature. Instead, most of this money goes through the state bureaucratic system. 

Compounded with this, the priorities of the federal grantors are often out-of-touch with the needs and priorities of the state. Though coffers of state bureaucracies could fare nicely from such grants, certain non-mandated federal priorities should not just be accepted so that state agencies can “qualify” for more federal money. For it is essential to recognize that from critical race theory education grants to the funds that come through Medicaid expansion, the potential for damaging federal dollars abound. 

All of these facts point to the necessity of state legislative oversight and accountability. All federal grants going to state agencies should be subject to as much legislative and statutory oversight as possible. This is vital so that practically every dollar of federal money coming into Mississippi is accountable to the citizens' elected representatives.

With Washington pumping out policies that are dominated by the priorities of big government, the state legislature must maintain its responsibility to protect Mississippi’s public policy from being polluted by the poisoned wells that dot the landscape of federal funding. 

(Jackson, MS): Mississippi has some of the highest paid public officials in America, despite being the poorest state, according to a new report out today. 

Published by the Mississippi Center for Public Policy, the Fat Cat Report offers a summary of the top 50 highest paid public officials in the state along with further data analysis.

The report reveals:

The Fat Cat report compares what top public officials make to the salaries of average nurses, State Troopers, and workers across the Magnolia state.  

“Mississippi taxpayers have a right to know how much their top public officials earn,” explained Douglas Carswell, CEO of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy. Clearly some officials produce value for the money they are paid. But many don’t.”

“How much should public officials be paid, and who should decide? The key is public accountability.”

“Our report suggests that officials appointed by boards tend to have the most inflated taxpayer-funded salaries. Officials that are either elected, or in close proximity to taxpayers, generally have lower salaries.”

“This suggests to me that direct accountability to the taxpayers is the best way of ensuring that public officials give taxpayers value for money, and our report makes some suggestions on what we could do to ensure that Mississippi taxpayers don’t get taken for a ride.”

Read the report in full HERE.

For more information or to request an interview with Mississippi Center for Public Policy CEO Douglas Carswell, please reach out to Hunter Estes, [email protected].

magnifiercross linkedin facebook pinterest youtube rss twitter instagram facebook-blank rss-blank linkedin-blank pinterest youtube twitter instagram