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Local mom, Amanda Kibble, is celebrating an important win for her family, and for school choice.

Earlier this year, Governor Tate Reeves signed HB 1341 into law.  This new law gives military families in Mississippi the right to transfer their children to any traditional public school around the state, assuming that the receiving school has capacity.  Early indications suggest this is extremely popular, with lots of military families using school choice to switch schools.

Amanda, and her family, found out the hard way that the law might not apply to those who serve their country in the National Guard.  There was a real risk that Amanda’s son might lose his place at his preferred school.
 
That’s when Amanda approached MCPP, and we took up her case.  MCPP has a long history of fighting for school choice, and our legal arm, the Mississippi Justice Institute has successfully litigated in defense of school choice.
 
I am delighted that Attorney General, Lynn Fitch, has now issued an opinion that the new school choice law for military families also applies, at least in part, to those in the National Guard.  Three cheers for the AG!

If military families now have public-to-public school choice, why shouldn’t everybody?  That is exactly what our “Move Up, Mississippi!” campaign aims to achieve. 

This week’s win for school choice makes it all the more disappointing that the new State Superintendent for Education, Lance Evans, took a sideswipe at school choice recently.
 
Speaking at a lunch in Jackson, Evans criticized school choice, suggesting that if a single dollar of public money went into private schools, those private schools should be subjected to the regulatory oversight that public schools are subject to.

Those that oppose school choice, and indeed I suspect Mr. Evans, know full well that extending state oversight across the private school sector would be untenable – which is why they suggest it.  But it is not the clever argument against school choice that they might imagine.
 
Giving every family in our state the right to choose a public school, as military families are now able to do, would not transfer public dollars into private schools. 
 
Amanda Kibble and those military families that now have school choice are not taking money out of public schools.  Does Lance Evans oppose their right to choose a school for their child?
 
MCPP proposes that under a separate program, families that attend private schools, or who home school, could get a tax credit reflecting the fact that they are already paying for a place at a public school that they are not taking.
 
Evans attack on parent power was not the worst of it.  More disappointing was the plodding presentation that preceded it about how amazing education is in our state. 
 
Evans trumpeted the fact that about a third of districts were rated D or F in 2016.  Now only a handful are rated D or F.  This, he implied, was evidence of progress, rather than a reflection of a broken accountability system. 
 
When officials invoke the broken grading system as evidence of improvement, it is not just the credibility to the grading we should question.
 
How bizarre, that in a solidly Republican-run state, we have somehow ended up with an anti-school choice official in charge?  Are the nine-member State Board of Education aware of Evans’ anti-school choice position?  Are the various state leaders that appointed those members of the Board? 

Since 2000, the number of students in America has increased by 5 percent.  The number of teachers by around 10 percent.  The number of education administrators, however, has shot up by 95 percent.

No wonder the education bureaucrats don’t want mom and dad to have control over where their child’s share of the education budget goes.  They might start to demand that it goes into the classroom.
 
Lance Evans talked about making private schools accountable.  Private schools already are accountable to every fee-paying parent.  The issue is how to ensure that public schools are made similarly accountable, too. 
 
We need to give every family in our state the public-to-public school choice that military families now have.

Waiting for my suitcase in the arrivals hall at Jackson airport the other evening, it occurred to me that the luggage carrousel was a pretty good metaphor for Mississippi politics. Like suitcases on a carrousel, many leaders simply sit on the conveyor belt of state politics, waiting their turn to get moved along to the next role.

Too often leaders are carried along by time and process, rarely offering any vision as to what our state should do differently. 
 
This explains why Mississippi conservatives have achieved less in 12 years than Arkansas, Louisiana and Alabama have accomplished in the past 12 months.  Louisiana did not even have a Republican governor this time last year, yet they’ve already passed universal school choice.

Things could be about to change if House Speaker, Jason White, has his way. 
 
This week, White announced that he will be hosting a Tax Policy Summit on September 24th to take a deep dive into the prospects for Tax Reform. 

My friend, Grover Norquist, will be speaking, as will Gov Reeves, as well leading conservative figures from the state legislature.

Having a conversation in public matters because in the past the leadership in our state Senate has done what it can to head off tax cuts.  Bringing the facts of what can and cannot be done into the open makes it far harder for anyone to keep finding new excuses to oppose actual conservative policy. 

Sunshine is the best disinfectant against the putrid politics of backroom deals.  We have seen far too many backroom maneuvers used to kill off good conservative policy in this state. 
 
Back in 2022, Mississippi passed a law to cut the state income tax to a flat 4 percent.  This $525 million tax cut, driven forward by Speaker Philip Gunn and Gov Reeves, benefited 1.2 million taxpayers and their families.  But we must not forget how some in the Senate fought against it – not in the open, of course. 

Weak Senate leadership has a history of opposing conservative proposals in our state.  Seldom do they have the courage to come out and explicitly kill off conservative measures.  Instead, they do it on the sly. 
 
The Senate leadership maneuvered to stop anti-DEI legislation in 2024.  I don’t recall anyone coming out and explaining why they opposed anti-DEI law.  They just killed it in committee with a nudge and wink. 

For three years in a row, the Senate leadership has killed off attempts to restore the ballot initiative.  Again, those against resorting the ballot lack the courage to say they are against it.  They killed that, too, on the sly. 

Rep Rob Roberson’s excellent school funding reform bill, perhaps the only big strategic achievement of this year’s session, passed despite attempts to scupper it by some in the Senate.  (Part of the backroom deal to get the bill passed was to change its name.  It really was that petty.)
 
When the Senate leadership wants to oppose an authentically conservative policy, they follow a now familiar pattern. 

A reason is cited as to why what is being proposed can’t be done.  School choice, we were once told, would be unconstitutional.  An anti-DEI law, it was implied, was unnecessary because there was no DEI on campus.

Once that excuse is shown to be nonsense (there is no constitutional bar to school choice, DEI is rampant on campus), another excuse is promptly conjured up.  And on it goes.

Each time the Senate leadership opposes conservative policy this way, I wonder what their alternatives are.  The answer is that most of the time there are none.  It is pretty low grade to oppose ideas simply because they are not your own. 
 
Eventually, of course, a suitcase that sits on the carousel for too long ends up in lost luggage.

As a direct consequence of the 2022 Reeves-Gunn tax cuts, Mississippi is now starting to see a flood of inward investment into the state.  

Every time you hear about a new factory opening up in our state, remember who and what helped make it happen. I am very optimistic that this Tax Summit could see further progress to make our state more competitive. 

You can tell a lot about someone’s politics given what they might have to say about the conviction of Donald Trump.
 
Anyone telling you that Trump’s conviction is comeuppance for a sordid hush-money scandal, in which he broke the law, probably leans left.
 
Someone explaining that it was all a disgraceful attempt by Joe Biden’s Democrats to stop the 45th President from being re-elected, is likely to be a conservative.
 
In an increasingly post-religious society, politics has become a substitute belief system for many.  The danger is that we view everything through the prism of politics.

Rather than ask what Trump’s conviction means for your side in the Reds versus Blues battle, perhaps what we ought to reflect on what this might all mean for America. 

For most of human history, the law meant whatever the powerful said it meant.  Anyone who has ever tried to do business in Russia or China knows that’s still the way things are in much of the non-Western world.
 
A system in which the law is elevated above the executive – in which the rule of law has supremacy – is historically unusual.  Indeed, it is largely the creation of people who spoke and wrote in the language in which you are reading this.
 
It was English-speaking civilization that invented the notion that the powerful are constrained by rules, and that the rules should apply to everyone equally.  A straight line runs from Magna Carta at Runnymede to the Founders at Philadelphia.  The US Bill of

Rights of 1789 was preceded by an English Bill of Rights of 1689. 

America has become the most successful society on earth precisely because in this Republic, government doesn’t get to change the rules as it likes.

“Exactly!” the anti-Trumpers will say. “Trump’s conviction is true to that tradition!  Even former Presidents are subject to the same rules as everyone else”.

But is that really so?  In what way has Trump been subjected to the same set of rules?  Surely, those on the right will say, he has been singled out, prosecuted over something essentially trivial?
 
Those that brought the charges, it seems to me, were motivated by politics, rather than justice.
 
Prosecuting political rivals is what they do in Russia, Brazil or Malaysia.  It is awful to see political prosecutions in the United States – and it bodes ill for the future of freedom in this country and around the world. 

Twenty years ago, George Bush’s electoral strategist, Karl Rove, hit upon the idea of using ‘wedge-issues’ to galvanize the conservative base.  At the time, Rove seemed to be remarkably successful.  Republicans won.
 
Two decades on, I wonder if it was partly Rove’s ‘wedge-issue’ approach that provoked the left into doing something similar.  Under Obama, the left became increasingly inflammatory.  Perhaps there is a straight line that runs from the politics of ‘wedge-issues’ in the noughties to the culture wars we see today?
 
Some on the left might be tempted to celebrate the use of lawfare to try to take down a political opponent.  They might want to stop and think first.  It is, I worry, only a question of time before we start to see something similar from the right. 
 
If lawfare becomes part of American politics, what chance is there that the United States remains exceptional compare with all those other less happy republics? 

It is not just the legal process that America needs to de-politicize.  We need to stop making everything a question of where you stand in the culture war.  Your views on Disney or money management, Taylor Swift or Chick-Fil-A should not automatically correlate with the way you vote. 

If it is politics alone that gives you a belief system in life, you are going to end up desperately disappointed with both politics and life.
 
The United States was founded by people that believed that to survive, a Republic needs a moral citizenry.  America needs to believe in something above politics and beyond the next election cycle.

America is now six months away from a Presidential election.  If current polls are correct and Donald Trump comes out ahead in the key battleground states, we could soon see a conservative in the White House, and a conservative-controlled Senate and House.

It is one thing to gain power.  It is quite another to know what to do with it.  Conservatives who try to run the federal government without a clear strategy in place soon end up being run by the federal government.  Why is this so?
 
The administrative state, with its vast alphabet soup of federal agencies, is fundamentally un-conservative.  Some might even say anti-conservative.
 
That is not to say that there is some sort of Deep State conspiracy against conservatives.  (Federal officials struggle to issue visas or approve new medicines on a timely basis. I highly doubt they are competent enough to engage in conspiracies). 

No, the problem is the mindset of those that work for the administrative state.  Or, what the French call “déformation professionnelle.” 
 
Those that work for big government bureaucracies tend to favor more government.  If your career is spent working for a federal agency, you will perhaps see federal fiat as the answer, whatever the question.
 
Many of those that work for the government are very smart.  Smart enough, in fact, to fall for the conceit that you can successfully engineer social and economic outcomes from above. 

Now that Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion has become the official ideology of America’s public institutions, federal officials likely find it easier to implement “diversity strategies” and talk about “microaggressions” than deliver competent government.

Being part of a national bureaucracy in Washington makes you more inclined to want to work closely with supranational bureaucracies such as the UN, WHO, or the EU.
 
What can an incoming conservative administration do about all this?  It is not enough to instruct the administrative state to govern differently.  We need a plan to re-wire the administrative state itself.  Here’s how:

1. Find the Right People.
 
Donald Trump’s decision to appoint Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court proved to be one of the most consequential things he has done.  As a result, the US Supreme Court now has a conservative majority for the first time in over half a century. 

Trump did not appoint the right people to the Supreme Court because he happened to know them.  It was the Federalist Society that identified and vetted suitable candidates for him.
 
I am delighted to be (a small) part of a project run by the Heritage Foundation and others to help identify the right people not so much for judicial appointments, but for positions across government.  Unless conservatives find the right people to install in the myriad of federal agencies, those that work in those agencies will nominate their own and little will change.

2. Shrink the Federal Machine. 
 
Argentina’s new President Milei almost halved the number of government departments in the week after he took office.  U.S. conservatives should do something similar. 

Do we really need a US Department of Education (created in 1980) or federal Housing department (1965)?  Surely education and housing are matters that can be left to each state? 
 
Why stop there?  There are currently 438 US federal agencies and sub-agencies.  Conservatives should go full Milei on them.

3. Control the spending.
 
What is the single biggest threat to the United States?  It’s not China or Islamism.  It is the ballooning national debt.  The US national debt is now growing by $1 trillion every 100 days.
 
Conservatives urgently need to bring federal spending under control. 

Remember that kerfuffle a few months back when Rep Kevin McCarty tried and failed to be elected House Speaker dozens of times?  One of the objections that the conservative refuseniks had was the fact that Congress did not seem to control federal spending.
 
The process by which Congress approves federal budgets is far too convoluted.  One committee approves agriculture budgets, another defense, and so on.  This makes it easier for various vested interests to ensure that their preferred spending items get approved.
 
We need to return to the principle that there is some form of unified Congressional budgetary oversight.  This is the only chance of restoring Congressional control over the administrative state’s spending.

4. Return authority to the states.
 
The 10th Amendment clearly states that “powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
 
Since the days of Woodrow Wilson, there has been a creeping coup that has seen federal agencies, abetted by the Supreme Court, usurp the primacy of the states. Until now.

In a little noticed ruling in 2022, in West Virginia v. the Environmental Protection Agency, the Supreme Court essentially said that a federal agency could not presume to make policy the way the EPA was trying to.  The ruling puts a question mark over the presumption that Congress has delegated major political and economic questions to executive agencies.
 
Conservatives need to build on this, and other similar rulings, to push back against decades of self-aggrandizement by federal agencies. 

How often do conservative voters vote for conservative leaders, but end up with more soft-left statism?  I would argue that this has been a constant feature of U.S. politics for over half a century, with a brief break from business as usual when Ronald Reagan was in the White House for 8 years in the 1980s.
 
Unless we are to see more of the same, we need to ensure that if and when conservatives gain control of the federal government, they use their one chance to achieve fundamental, strategic change to the way America is run. There may never be another.
 
Our aim must not be just to oust liberals, or even to install a particular leader.  Our goal should be to renew America by overturning the incremental coup that has created in Washington DC an administrative state that our Founders never envisioned and never sanctioned.

Beware of politicians who want to ban things.

What would you most like to see Mississippi’s elected lawmakers do during the current legislative session? 

Action to eliminate the reams of red tape holding our state back, maybe?  Further tax cuts, perhaps?  With so many other southern states moving ahead with school choice, you might wish that our lawmakers would do something similar.

I doubt that a bill to ban “squatted” trucks is your top priority. Yet, that is precisely what one bill in our state legislature aims to do. 

I’m not about to invest a lot of effort into opposing this bill, but I do think we should be wary of politicians in the business of banning things. 

Typically, politicians resort to banning things when they don’t have any other ideas.  The impulse to ban things is driven by their search for validation and purpose. 


Those in favor of a ban on “squatted” trucks are quick to tell us that action is urgent given how dangerous these trucks are.  I can think of a lot of things that could be deemed dangerous. 
 
Do conservatives really want to get into the business of banning things because they are dangerous?  Once you start, where do you stop?  If trucks are to be banned for being dangerous, wait ‘til you hear what progressives have to say about guns.
 
Under this proposed law, anyone caught driving a vehicle whose front ends are raised more than four inches above the height of the rear fender faces a $100 fine.  Will police officers pull people over to measure their fenders?  Should the guy with a truck raised a mere 3 inches expect to get pulled over every time?  

As the parent of a teenager, I’ve discovered how adding a young person to your insurance policy can make your premiums soar.  This is because the insurance system is good at assessing risk.  Higher risk = higher premiums. 
 
If squatted trucks really were the danger that the detractors claim, surely it would be reflected in raised insurance premiums to the point where they became prohibitively expensive.
 
In a free society, there must be an overwhelmingly good reason to use the state’s monopoly of force to restrict something.  It is not enough to ban something because we disapprove of it.  Or. as I fear, disapprove of the people that drive “squatted” trucks.  

Once politicians form the habit of seeking out things to ban for the benefit of the rest of us, they won’t stop.  Next will come a ban on certain types of vapes.  Or, as in California, certain food additives and Skittles.  If they can ban one type of truck, why not another?
 
If you want to see where relentless banning leads, take a look at my own native Britain.  Despite having had notionally conservative governments, politicians across the pond have relentlessly banned things from certain breeds of dog to plastic drinking straws.  From the ability to use email lists for marketing to self-defense pepper spray.  From disposable cutlery and gas water heaters to the internal combustion engine (from 2035).

On their own, none of these restrictions have proved to be a catastrophe (although the ban on internal combustion cars, once it comes into force, may yet prove to be).  Collectively, however, the blizzard of bans has been devastating by infantilizing British society.  
 
Treated like children, more and more people behave like children.  Denied responsibility, society grows irresponsible.  Britain today feels utterly demoralized as a consequence.  This is what happens when you put politicians in charge of deciding what’s best for everyone else.
 
Banning tilted trucks won’t be the end of the world for Mississippi.  It will be the end of a little bit more liberty.

The impulse to ban things, I believe, comes from what H.L. Mencken called “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be having a good time.”  Let’s leave Mississippi truck drivers alone.

Douglas Carswell is the President & CEO of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy.

Did you know that Mississippi spends a higher share of our overall wealth on healthcare than almost any other state in America?  Yet despite this, we still have some of the worst health outcomes in the country.

Source:  AFP Mississippi report on Certificate of Need, James Bailey

Some believe that the answer is to spend an even larger amount by expanding Medicaid.  Mississippi’s House of Representatives has just voted to do precisely that.

The debate over Medicaid expansion now appears to hinge on whether under the expansion scheme there will be any realistic work requirement.  Critics fear that without a robust requirement for recipients of free health care to be in work, Medicaid expansion is little more than a something-for-nothing system of soft socialism.

It remains to be seen if the Senate will support the House’s bill – and if it will do so by a large enough margin to overturn any future gubernatorial veto. 

There is, however, another proposal that has attracted far less attention that really would improve healthcare in our state.

Healthcare in Mississippi is deliberately restricted by a set of laws known as Certificate of Need, or CON, laws.  These laws require anyone wanting to expand existing services or offer new services to apply for a Certificate of Need permit.  By not issuing permits to new operators, competitors are kept out of the market - which suits the existing providers. 

Our recent report on Certificate of Need reform shows how harmful this red tape can be.  If we removed this protectionist red tape, we would get far more bang for our buck, however much the legislature decided to spend on Medicaid.

Florida, Tennessee and both North & South Carolina have all recently removed their CON laws – and they each have significantly better healthcare as a consequence.

Now there is a chance that Mississippi might do something similar.  Rep Zuber’s excellent bill (HB 419) opens the possibility that some CON rules could be repealed. 

Of course, now that the bill is before the House, every sort of parasitic vested interest is frantically lobbying to kill the bill.

Why?  CON confers on existing providers a means to legally exclude the competition. 

Imagine in the search engine Yahoo! had been able to use CON laws to shut down Google?  Or if Friends Reunited could have used CON laws to prevent Facebook?  Or if the folk that made DVDs could have used CON to prevent Netflix from taking off?  CON laws have been doing precisely this to healthcare in our state. 

CON laws in Mississippi are one of the last vestiges of the good ole boy system that has held Mississippi back.

Often in politics, it is easier to define a problem than it is to solve it.

Remember Barack Obama’s eloquent speech about the need to unite America beyond red states Vs blue states?  When Obama left office, America was more politically polarized than before.

Who could forget Al Gore’s theatrics as he talked about the need to save the planet?  I doubt a Gore-run administration would be able to control the country’s borders, let alone control global sea levels or the climate.

Remember how during last year’s gubernatorial race here in Mississippi, Brandon Presley, the Democrat candidate, waxed lyrically about the fate of rural hospitals?  Hosing federal funds around is unlikely to change the fact that hospitals that are underused will remain underused. 

Politicians can certainly make problems worse.  Obama, I would argue, exacerbated America’s divisions.  Gore & co have advocated for an energy policy that does nothing to control the climate, but has made people poorer.  Subsidising an underused health service is unlikely to make it magically sustainable. 

Occasionally, however, politicians have it in their gift to do something that really would improve things. 

In a report we published this week, we show that there is a solution to Mississippi’s healthcare crisis staring us in the face:  our leaders could abolish the anticompetitive laws that intentionally limit the number of healthcare providers in our state.  This would improve access to healthcare and lower costs for everyone. 

For years, if a healthcare provider wants to offer new services or expand existing services in 19 key areas of health care, they are required by law to get a permit.  These Soviet-style permits, known as Certificates of Need (CON), are also required for a provider wanting to spend more than $1.5 million on new medical equipment, relocate services from one part of the state to another, or change ownership.

Unlike other sensible licensing requirements, CON requirements are not designed primarily to assess a provider’s qualifications, safety record, or fitness.  They are about central planning to decide if each new applicant’s services are “needed” by the community.  I believe that it should be up to patients and practioners to decide what is needed, not government bureaucrats.

CON laws in Mississippi limit the provision of long term care, despite demographic change that has seen the number of elderly people needing care increase dramatically.  Ambulatory services, key diagnostic services, psychiatric services and many other services are all limited by CON laws.

If the case for change is so overwhelming, why has it not already been done?  In any market, when there are restrictions imposed to keep out the competition, there will be various vested interests that lobby for their retention.  So, too, with CON laws. 

Defenders of CON restrictions suggest that CON repeal would be risky and dangerous.  They like to imply that any reform would reduce access and quality would suffer. 

Such concerns are unfounded.  Over 100 million Americans—nearly a third of the population—live in states without CON laws in health care. Four in ten Americans live in states with limited CON regimes that apply to only one or two services, such as ambulance services or nursing homes.

If our lawmakers are serious about improving healthcare in Mississippi, I hope they read our report, which sets out not only what needs to be done, but provides a roadmap explaining how to do it. 

High flying rhetoric won’t improve our state.  Getting down to work and removing CON laws will.

Report identifies key reforms needed to boost health outcomes in Magnolia state

Removing outdated restrictions on health care would boost health care in Mississippi, according to a new report published today.  Mississippi has some of the worst health outcomes in the country, and the full repeal of these anticompetitive laws in the health sector would cut costs and improve access to treatment.

For several decades, an official permit has been required for health care providers wanting to offer new services or expand existing services in 19 key areas of health care.  These permits, known as Certificates of Need (CON), are also required for a provider wanting to spend more than $1.5 million on new medical equipment, relocate services from one part of the state to another, or change ownership.

Unlike other health care licensing laws already in place, the CON process is not designed primarily to assess a provider’s qualifications, safety record, or fitness.  Instead, CON laws require regulators to centrally plan the health care sector by assessing whether each new applicant’s services are “needed” by the community. That question, however, can only be truly answered through the voluntary choices of practitioners and patients.

“If you want to know why Mississippi does not have medical care where it is most needed, CON laws bear much of the blame.  They intentionally take away options for health care,” explained Douglas Carswell, President and CEO of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy.

“What started out a generation ago as a misguided attempt to restrict increases in health costs has become a legally-sanctioned protectionist scheme.  These outdated laws are indefensible and must go.”

CON laws in Mississippi limit the provision of long term care, despite demographic change that has seen the number of elderly people needing care increase dramatically.  Ambulatory services, key diagnostic services, psychiatric services and many other services are all limited by CON laws.

The report, authored by Matthew Mitchell, one of America’s leading experts on health care regulation, references overwhelming evidence which shows that CON laws mean higher spending, less access, and diminished quality of care.

Mitchell’s report identifies a road map for reform, highlighting how full abolition could be achieved.  “The evidence from other states without CON laws not only shows how a Mississippi without CON would enjoy greater access to lower cost and higher quality care, but it also gives us a roadmap for how to do it. In the report, I talk about 11 different strategies for reform,” said Mitchell.

“The Governor and the new Speaker have both committed to improving health outcomes in Mississippi by repealing restrictive practices.  We are excited to see legislation aimed at CON repeal, as well as action by the Board of Health to remove the red tape,” added Carswell.

CON-paper-FINALDownload

Last year, Mississippi Republicans won an overwhelming majority.  Could 2024 be the year when they use that majority to deliver the kind of big, strategic change our state desperately needs? 
 
Here are a number of reforms that Mississippi conservatives have it in their gift to implement, which would transform the long term prospects of our state for the better.

  1. Education Freedom: 

2024 could be the year that we give every family in the state control over their child’s share of education tax dollars, through an Education Freedom Account.  Arkansas passed legislation to do precisely that last year.  Tennessee and Louisiana are poised to do something similar.  Rather than trailing behind, Mississippi lawmakers should take the lead, delivering big, strategic change to improve education in this state, too.   

The Mississippi Center for Public Policy recently held a public rally for education freedom, with Corey DeAngelis and local educators, helping mainstream the idea.  Recent polls now show overwhelming public support.  

Too many families in Mississippi cannot get health coverage.  Rather than hosing federal dollars at the problem, we need to look at what states like Florida are doing to innovate, with alternatives to insurance-based healthcare.  This means ending the restrictive Certificate of Need laws that prevent new low cost health care providers from operating.  It also means allowing nurse practitioners more autonomy.  The Mississippi Center for Public Policy will soon publish a roadmap on how to go about removing CON laws.   

In 2023 Mississippi had a large state budget surplus.  Rather than wait for politicians to think up new ways to spend that surplus, we need to see tax cuts in 2024.  One option would be a further reduction in the state income tax.  

Our neighboring states are reducing the tax burden on families and businesses.  If we want to reverse the population decline in our state, we need to do so too.

In recent months we have seem appalling behaviour by ‘woke’ academics at several leading universities.  It is now clear that DEI is destroying American academia.  So why are public universities in Mississippi still running DEI programs?  The Governor of Oklahoma recently issued an order terminating funding for DEI programs in public universities in that state.  Mississippi needs to stop the rot in public universities and end DEI programs in 2024.

While those are our top four priorities for 2024, here are some other things we would like to see our law makers deliver:

If Mississippi conservatives passed these eight or so laws, they would transform our state for the better.  No longer would we be considered a laggard by some, but as a leader.  

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