What a win! This week, Mississippi made history as the first state in the U.S.—aside from oil-rich Alaska—to pass legislation eliminating the income tax. While nine other states have never had an income tax, Mississippi is blazing a trail by actively dismantling it.
“So what?”, you might say. “Why does this matter if full elimination is still a decade away?” The answer is simple: it’s already transforming our state for the better. Eliminating the income tax makes Mississippi a magnet for growth. Look at Texas, Florida, and Tennessee—three southern states without income taxes that are booming. Even Arkansas recently lowered its rate to stay competitive with us!
Since we began reducing our rate to a flat 4% in 2022, the Mississippi Development Agency reports an extraordinary $25 billion in inward investment. Businesses are flocking here, confident that the payroll tax burden is fading away. This victory isn’t just about economics—it’s a triumph for conservative reform.
Around the Governor’s desk on Thursday evening, we saw bold leadership from Speaker Jason White, Rep. Trey Lamar, and a few dedicated others who fought for this change. We should not forget the role of former Speaker, Philip Gunn, either. Mississippi is, as you know, full of southern charm. One consequence of this is that each time a significant reform passes in the state legislature, there is a tendency to pretend that the change came about because of some kind of kumbaya consensus.
This win came from grit, not just goodwill. Days ago, some were still resisting real elimination. Minds moved because of determined advocacy. This success proves that the roadblocks to reform can be overcome with bold, principled leadership.
There might be a consensus about income tax elimination now, but it is a new consensus, won by bold conservative leaders fighting for it. We salute those that put principle on the line and fought for change!
Mississippi has made history as the first state in the U.S.—aside from oil-rich Alaska—to pass legislation aimed at phasing out its income tax.
This monumental achievement, spearheaded by Governor Tate Reeves and House Speaker Jason White, marks a significant victory for the state. The newly passed bill outlines a plan to eliminate the income tax over the next decade, starting with incremental cuts and followed by a series of budget-driven "triggers."
Beginning next year, Mississippi’s income tax rate will drop in 0.25 percent increments, sliding from 4 percent to 3 percent by 2030. After that, further reductions will hinge on the state’s budget surplus. Given Mississippi’s recent track record of substantial surpluses, the income tax could vanish entirely by the mid-2030s.
So, how did Mississippi become such a trailblazer? It very nearly did not happen.
The push to eliminate the income tax has been a cornerstone of Governor Reeves’ agenda, with serious legislative efforts kicking off in 2022 under then-House Speaker Philip Gunn.
Gunn’s genius was to simplifying the state’s variable tax rates into a flat 4 percent on income above $10,000. While this didn’t eliminate the tax outright, it leveled the playing field for Mississippi households, setting the stage for broader support of full elimination.
Fast forward to this year, when Speaker Jason White and Representative Trey Lamar introduced a plan to phase out the income tax by 2037. Their initial proposal included a partial tax swap, offset by modest increases in gas and sales taxes.
What happened next was both fascinating – and, if you support income tax elimination, rather fortuitous.
The Mississippi Senate has been a constant drag on conservative reform. They have either opposed, or come to grudgingly accept, almost every conservative policy proposal over the past few years, from school choice to red tape reduction. So, too, with income tax elimination.
The Senate, reluctant to fully embrace income tax elimination, opted for a cautious approach. They amended the bill with a "trigger" mechanism, tying future tax cuts to significant revenue growth outpacing spending increases. Some in the Senate perhaps saw this as a clever stall tactic—until a fortunate blunder turned the tables.
The Senate miscalculated the formula, placing a decimal point in the wrong place. Math matters. Something the Senate design as a brake on tax cuts turned out to be an accelerator.
Unless the state government runs a deficit, future surpluses will likely drive steady cuts, and Mississippi – despite the Senate leaderships best efforts – will be as competitive in tax terms as Tennessee and Texas.
Set aside the soap opera, this is great news for our state. Already there is evidence that in 2024, by some measures, Mississippi performed well economically, and may have been one of the fastest growing states in America that year. This tax reform will only add to this Mississippi momentum.
Perhaps what the Senators math missteps shows is that Mississippi now needs to turn its attention to education reforms? If the Senators stopped blocking school choice the way they tried to block income tax elimination, maybe math standards might be better both inside and outside the legislature.
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.
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!
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.
Tax reform is on the agenda. This is excellent news for our state!
To prosper, Mississippi must create a tax environment that is friendly to both businesses and families.
We have moved in the right direction in the past three years. According to the Tax Foundation, Mississippi now ranks as the 20th most business-friendly state in terms of tax.
This improvement in our state’s tax competitiveness is a consequence of the Reeves-Gunn tax reforms. Under Governor Tate Reeves and Speaker Philip Gunn, Mississippi passed legislation to cut the state income tax to a flat 4 percent and allowed businesses to fully expense capital spending. But the tax burden in Mississippi is still too high.
Our state is surrounded by states, such as Tennessee, Alabama and Texas, that have a lower tax burden than we do. Even Louisiana manages to tax less than us.
Fortunately, we have some state leaders that recognize this. Speaker Jason White is hosting a Tax Policy Summit in September to look at what might be done. Lieutenant Governor Delbert Hosemann has announced a study group in the Senate to look at fiscal policy, with the ultimate goal, he says, to “lower the tax burden and ensure taxpayer dollars stay in taxpayer pockets”.
Mississippi’s House of Representatives also has a select committee on tax reform, which had its first hearing this week.
To be blunt, the House select committee hearing the other day was a big disappointment, especially seeing as we are a supposedly conservative state. Much of what I heard sounded like special pleading from vested interests to increase taxes, not cut them. I wondered at times if Bernie Sanders was in the room.
The hearing on tax reform began with a witness making the point that Mississippi needed to spend more money to build more road infrastructure. The conversation then became about the best way to do so; raise sales tax, tax gas more or charge motorists per mileage.
Not raising tax revenues was described as a “failure to invest”. Spending more tax dollars would pay for itself, it was asserted. Any serious review of tax policy in our state should not start with special pleading. It should start with the basic facts about the shape of Mississippi’s public finances.
The number one fact about Mississippi public finances is that we have a substantial budget surplus. That is to say politicians in our state have more of our tax dollars than they currently know what to do with.
How could we change the tax system to allow people to keep more of their own money before politicians figure out ways of squandering the surplus? That is where the select committee ought to have started.
What kind of tax reforms are feasible depends on the extent to which our budget surplus is cyclical or structural. In other words, is the budget surplus a temporary phenomenon, caused by growth at this stage in the economic cycle? Or is the surplus a surplus not withstanding fluctuations in economic performance?
This matters because if the surplus is temporary, tax reform will need to be phased in carefully to avoid having to put taxes back up again, as did Kansas. Failure to consider if our budget surplus is a blip or a longer term phenomenon allows those opposed to significant tax cuts to lazily claim Mississippi cannot afford more tax cuts. (Note how when the Senate Leadership was trying to water down the Reeves-Gunn tax cuts in 2022 they were able to get away with the claim that we would be ‘like Kansas’.)
Having established what Mississippi can - and cannot - afford in terms of tax cuts, the select committee should then consider what type of tax cuts.
One possibility would be to cut the grocery tax. This would be a relatively small but symbolic cut, which is why it tends to be favored by the Senate Leadership which is lukewarm about any significant reduction in the size of government in our state.
Another possibility would be to phase out the income tax altogether. This would be a big and bold step, and would need triggers and thresholds to ensure it was not done ‘like Kansas’.
“But who will pay for our roads, Carswell!”, I hear you say. “The witness who said we need to invest in infrastructure had a point, no?” I agree.
There are some things, like roads, that our state government does need to do. As and when we need to raise tax revenue for specific projects, like road building, then our lawmakers should propose ad hoc tax increases to pay for it.
Arkansas asked voters to approve a specific increase in sales tax, for a ten year fixed period, to pay for key state infrastructure. In other words, tax revenue was raised for a purpose. Taxes were not raised on the pretext of special pleading and then kept at the elevated level forever. What is very odd is to allow the special pleading of vested interests to be used as an argument for raising the tax burden, in a conservative voting state, and in front of a supposedly conservative-run House committee.
If Mississippi is going to achieve meaningful tax reform, those considering it need to be less Bernie Sanders, and more Ronald Reagan. The lobbyists might not like it, but the voters will.
America faces an axis of aggression. China, Russia, Iran and North Korea are not only actively undermining US interests. They increasingly seem to be working together.
How should America respond?
According to a new report published by Mississippi Senator, Roger Wicker, America needs a new national defense strategy capable of responding to this “emerging axis of aggressors”. “21st Century Peace Through Strength: a generational investment in the US military” offers a serious analysis of US military capabilities and makes some important recommendations.
Wicker calls for an immediate $55 billion increase in military spending in 2025, on top of the almost $900 billion existing budget. The aim, he suggests, should be for the United States to spend around 5 percent of GDP on defense.
To put that in context, America today spends 3.4 GDP percent on defense, and has not spent more than 5 percent since Ronald Reagan was in the White House. Reagan famously won the Cold War, facing down the Soviet threat by beefing up American strength. Wicker envisions a similar approach in “Peace through Strength”.
What is really interesting about Wicker’s proposal is not the call for more money for the military, but his suggestion that there should be a “dramatic increase in competition in the defense industrial base”. Senator Wicker is right. Often, we think of applying free market principles to education or healthcare. There is a very powerful argument for applying free market discipline to defense spending, too.
With the national debt growing, it is vital that America gets the maximum bang for every defense buck. Wicker puts forward ideas as to how to make this happen through far reaching “acquisition reform”. Allowing more market competition in the defense sector would help ensure that America avoided the sorry fate of my own native Britain.
The UK spends about $70 billion a year on defense. That might be less than a tenth of what America spends, but it still means that the UK has the sixth largest defense budget in the world, above Japan and roughly on a parr with Russia.
Unfortunately, Britain has not been effective at converting what she is able to spend on defense into military muscle. Despite spending all that money, British aircraft carriers seldom seem to carry many aircraft. Indeed, the expensive new carriers don’t always seem to be able to spend much time at sea. The less said about British tanks the better.
UK defense acquisition has been a series of costly disasters because the defense budget is often spent in the interests of various favored suppliers, rather than the military.
I first became aware of quite how bad British defense acquisition was on a visit to Afghanistan as a Member of the British Parliament. Troops in Helmand complained about a shortage of helicopters, yet I noticed rows of American Black Hawk helicopters on the runway back in Kandahar.
Why, I wanted to know, didn’t we Brits just buy Black Hawks from the American company that made them? I soon discovered that British defense acquisition is viewed by some as a giant job creation scheme. Or else it is about filling the order books of well-connected companies, not giving the military what they need.
America needs acquisition reform to avoid defense dollars being spent by various vested interests, rather than on the best interests of the US military. Some will say that America cannot afford to increase defense spending. I worry that America cannot afford not to.
Years of federal deficits mean than the US national debt is soaring. There will be enormous pressures on federal spending. All the more reason to ensure that the US gets maximum value for every defense dollar.
Let’s hope Wicker’s reforms are acted upon whoever is in the White House.
So often politics focuses on trivia. What Wicker has done is produce a serious study to address important geo political questions that the United States is going to have to deal with.
Putting America first does not mean ignoring what is happening on the other side of the world. Merely wishing away anything outside the Western hemisphere does not make the United States more secure. It ultimately means that the world’s problems will show up at the US border.
Putting America first means investing in defense. Wicker shows how we might do that.
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.
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.