Dear Friend,

Happy New Year!

Mississippi’s new legislative session starts in a few days, and I wanted to share with you the Freedom Agenda 2022 - a list of the 12 reforms that we are pushing for.

Mississippi needs a boost.  While many southern states have flourished over the past forty years, Mississippi has been held back by bad public policy. Instead of relying on federal handouts, in 2022 our state leaders need to do more to create the conditions that allow actual wealth creation.  

Here are 12 realistic, achievable reforms that we can implement in 2022 to extend economic liberty, cut taxes and help our state grow:
 

Freedom Agenda 2022

1. Open School Enrolment: If Mississippi is to prosper, we need to address the elephant in the room — education underachievement. To improve public schools in Mississippi, we need to give moms and dads more control. We believe families dissatisfied with what their local school board offers them should have the right to send their child — and their tax dollars — to a different school of their choice.
2. Cap School Board Administrative Costs: Per pupil spending has risen in Mississippi, but teacher pay has not. That’s because too much of the education budget gets spent on fat cat bureaucrats’ salaries. We need to cap administration costs and ensure money goes into the classroom instead.
3. More Charter Schools:  We need multiple Charter School authorizers so that we have more than a handful of Charter Schools. Unless we change the mandate of the Authorizer Board to allow more Charter Schools, we should have multiple authorizers.
4. Combat Critical Race Theory: Rather than equipping young people with the skills they need to flourish, too often our education system seems more focused on introducing toxic theories and ideologies into the classroom. We have already published a bill to combat Critical Race Theory, which we have sent to every member of the legislature.
5. Academic Transparency: Parents deserve to know what their children are being taught. One idea to combat Critical Race Theory is to require school boards to publish details of what they are actually teaching young Mississippians.
6. Free Speech on Campus: The best way to defeat bad ideas is to ensure that they are replaced by better ones. This is why we need to safeguard free speech on our college campuses.
7. Axe the Tax: Other Southern states like Tennessee, Texas, and Florida do not have a state income tax — and are flourishing. We need to abolish the state income tax here, too. With a billion-dollar budget surplus, our state can afford it!
8. Cut the Red Tape: We are behind a one-in-two-out proposal that would force officials to reduce regulatory red tape.
9. Certificate of Need Repeal: Mississippi has some of the worst health outcomes in America because we have some of the most severe restrictions on expanding healthcare facilities. We believe that the free market should decide if there is a need for particular services, and our idea is to remove these “good-old-boy” restrictions.
10. Repeal of Moratorium on Home Health Agencies: With more folks than ever seeking to get medical care from the comfort of their own homes, we support making it easier to offer medical access directly.
11. Reduce Barriers to Telemedicine: In an age of unprecedented integration between digital technology and daily life, we believe that Mississippians should be allowed to access their healthcare systems and doctors using modern devices.
12. Agricultural “Sandbox:" We would like to empower innovators and small businesses to bring new technology to market with reduced regulatory burdens that could allow for Mississippi to become the nation’s leader in this field.