Douglas Carswell
Submitted by Douglas Carswell
“It is time to be even bolder and make Mississippi properly competitive,” MCPP’s Carswell writes.
In recent years, left-wing ideologues seem to have been elected to office in states like California, Oregon, New York and Illinois. There they have raised taxes, imposed radical curriculums in the classroom, and in some cases even attempted to defund the police.
While some parts of the U.S. have lurched left, state leaders across much of the South have gone in the opposite direction, and the South is starting to thrive as a result.
Already, the southern United States is the most populous region of America. In the past couple of years, this growth has accelerated as hundreds of thousands of Americans leave the left-wing la la land states, and move to places like Texas, Georgia, Tennessee and Florida.
If this trend continues, the South may soon become the center of economic, demographic and perhaps even political gravity in America.
But, of course, there is one state slap bang in the middle of the South that has not benefited, until now, as much from this growth opportunity – our own state, Mississippi.
Mississippi needs to emulate what other southern states, like Tennessee, Texas and Florida, have already done. While we have cut Mississippi’s income tax, Tennessee, Texas and Florida have eliminated theirs. We need to do the same.
While Mississippi deregulates, we have done so by drawing on what we have seen work in neighboring states. It is time to be even bolder and make Mississippi properly competitive.
Our state has been run by those that call themselves conservative for years. On behalf of Mississippi’s overwhelmingly conservative voters, the Mississippi Center for Public Policy has just published a conservative Platform for our state.
Here are some of its highlights:
1. CUT TAXES: With a massive state budget surplus, we propose an authentically conservative budget that would cut personal income tax and corporation tax responsibly.
2. RECALL: We need to give local residents the power to recall ineffective and incompetent mayors.
3. RIGHT OF INITIATIVE: It is time to fix the right of initiative so that the public is able to vote to change state law.
4. EDUCATION: Legislation is needed to break the monopoly of the Charter School Authorizer Board, which acts as a roadblock to reform. At the same time, we need a bill to ensure transparency in education, so that moms and dads can see what their child is being taught.
5. CUT THE COST OF HEALTH CARE: Too many people in our state are unable to afford healthcare. The answer is not to hose more federal dollars at local healthcare, which would simply inflate costs. Instead, we need a concerted effort to eliminate the restrictive practices that make health care more expensive by preventing new providers from operating.
6. REINS ACT: Bureaucrats like to make decisions and spend taxpayers’ money without accountability. To combat this, conservatives in our state should support a “Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny” (REINS) bill.
7. ANTI-ESG: The ESG (Environmental Social and Governance) agenda promoted by big money managers is forcing publicly listed corporations to promote a “woke” agenda. An anti-ESG bill that we are behind will help restore the voices of everyday citizens in the economy.
8. A WOMEN’S BILL OF RIGHTS: Our Women’s Bill of Rights would codify, for purposes of law and regulations, the common sense—and previously self-evident—definition of “woman.”
9. A PARENTS’ BILL OF RIGHTS: Young people have been subjected to irreversible gender reassignment procedures that they have subsequently come to regret. Our proposal would stop this in our state.
This is a list of practical steps that any conservative in our state ought to be able to support to make our state even better.
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Submitted by Douglas Carswell. He is the President & CEO of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy. Details of the Conservative Platform can be found on their website mspolicy.org
Guest Editorial
