Dear Friend,

The center of economic gravity in America is moving. For much of the twentieth century, New York, Chicago and California were the country’s major commercial clusters.  Now, however, a lot of economic activity has started to shift – and it is heading south. 
 
Faced with high taxes and regulation, many businesses like Tesla have relocated from California to Texas. But it is not just companies. People are on the move, too.
 
While the population of New York state fell by 300,000 between July 2020 and July 2021, Texas grew by 310,000. An estimated one percent of Californians left their home state last year, while the population of Florida increased by about the same percentage.
 
Georgia and Tennessee might have seemed economically unimportant forty or fifty years ago. Today, Atlanta and Nashville are great business hubs.
 
But in this story of southern success, there is one glaring omission: our own state of Mississippi.
 
Mississippi is surrounded by states that have benefited from a southward tilt in economic activity. So why is our state not growing the way that Georgia or Tennessee are? If the population of the south is increasing, how come so many young Mississippians continue to move elsewhere to find work? 
 
At the Mississippi Center for Public Policy, we believe that the key to economic growth is to have low taxes, light regulation and limited government. 
 
In order to ensure that Mississippi prospers, we have launched the Freedom Agenda for 2022, a practical set of steps that we can take to ensure that our state grows.

• Abolish the state income tax: Neither Texas, Tennessee, nor Florida have a state income tax – and they are thriving. Scrapping Mississippi’s state income tax would give our state a badly-needed boost, and give ordinary working folk a tax break.

• Cut regulation: Mississippi is burdened by far too many boards, commissions, and states agencies that are constantly pushing new regulations onto everyone else. We have practical proposals to make our state a place where it easier to do business, with one-in-two-out deregulation reform. 

• Enable innovation: Economic activity is moving to those parts of America where innovation is happening. To ensure Mississippi is a place where innovation can happen, we would like to see so-called "sand box" legislation to enable entrepreneurs to try new ways of doing things without having to get a permit. 

• Education: If we want Mississippi to have the same living standards as elsewhere in America, we need to address education underperformance in our state. Our Freedom Agenda includes a set of reforms that would improve the life-chances of young Mississippians from every background. 

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