The new legislative session is well underway and as of today almost 3,000 bills have been drafted. Many more bills are expected to appear ahead of the mid-February deadline.
Of these thousands of potential new laws, only a few hundred will then emerge from the various committees about a week later. Those that make it that far will then be debated and voted on in each chamber. Bills have to get through that process in both the Senate and House – and avoid the Governor’s veto - in order to become law.
So, what are the chances that we might actually see some of the big changes that Mississippi needs this session?
There will be no shortage of what those in the Capitol call ‘show bills’. These are laws passed that are essentially declaratory in nature. They sound great, but they are largely inconsequential. Think of them as the equivalent of a legislative press release.
What Mississippi needs is not showboating, but the sort of significant reforms that will change our state for the better. Here are three big changes to look out for:
Education Freedom?
Every year sees a blizzard of education bills. Many of them are important in their own right, but what are the chances that we see some of the game-changing reforms of the kind that are happening in states all around us?
Education freedom is for everyone...
Last year, Arkansas passed the LEARNS Act, which raised teacher pay to a minimum of $50,000 and established a system of Education Freedom Accounts. This means that participating families get given an account into with the state government pays 90 percent of the previous year’s average net school aid per student. They are free to use that for tuition, fees, school supplies, tutoring services and more. Mississippi needs to fund students, not systems.
I am very excited at the prospect of seeing some substantial changes here in Mississippi.
2. Income tax elimination?
I was super excited to hear Governor Tate Reeves again identify eliminating the state income tax by 2029 as a top priority. As he put it, “Eliminating the income tax does not require cutting expenditures or raising taxes in other areas. Rather, it requires that our government lives within its means.”
100 percent, yes!
Massive amounts of inward investment are now flowing into our state. There is a real chance for Mississippi to prosper. It would be a game-changer for our state if lawmakers seized the moment now to pass legislation to eliminate the income tax before the end of the decade. Will they?
3. Action to improve healthcare?
A lot of lobbying is going on at the Capitol to expand Medicaid. There’s never a shortage of those eager to explain why something needs to be paid for with someone else’s money.
For some on the Left, Medicaid expansion has become a totemic issue. They are no longer debating how more Medicaid money might improve things in practice. They just feel it’s the right thing to do.
I fear that anyone who sees Medicaid expansion as the only way to improve the health of our state may be disappointed. So, too, will the taxpayer.
Over a quarter of the state already receives Medicaid benefits, and they often have suboptimal health outcomes. Moving people off private insurance programs onto Medicaid (which would inevitably happen) is unlikely to improve matters.
There is, however, one thing that our lawmakers could do right away that would improve access to healthcare; repeal the intentionally anticompetitive Certificate of Need laws that have hamstrung the healthcare system in our state for a generation.
Will our lawmakers do the one thing that would be certain to improve access to healthcare? I am hopeful that they will.
This new legislative session marks the start of Mississippi’s four-year political cycle. Republicans hold every state-wide office and have large majorities in both the Senate and House. There could never be a better time to achieve significant change.
Political capital, politicians often mistakenly believe, can be banked. In reality it loses value faster than a dollar bill under Joe Biden. When it comes to political capital, it is more a question of ‘use it or lose it’. Let’s hope our legislature spends their capital to achieve the change we need.
