For decades, Mississippi sat near the bottom of every economic ranking that mattered. Income, education, growth — the conventional wisdom held that the state was a permanent laggard, useful mainly as a punchline.
That story is now out of date. The latest Rich States, Poor States index, published this week by the American Legislative Exchange Council, ranks Mississippi 24th in the nation for economic outlook. That measure is not a snapshot — it is a forward-looking composite built from fifteen state-level policy variables, including tax burden, regulatory environment, and labor market flexibility. A decade ago, Mississippi sitting in the top half of that table would have been treated as a reporting error. This year, it is a fact. Three trends in the underlying data tell the story. First, the size of state and local government in Mississippi is shrinking, measured per capita. The state had roughly 656 full-time-equivalent public employees per 10,000 residents at the peak in 2009. That figure has now fallen below 615. The private sector — the part of the economy that actually generates wealth — is correspondingly more prominent. Second, the cost of doing business has fallen. Mississippi's average workers' compensation costs per $100 of payroll have come down from $2.30 in 2008 to $0.94 in 2023, according to Oregon's biennial state ranking. That kind of decline does not show up in a press release; it shows up in capital expenditure decisions.
Third — and this matters most — the population is no longer leaving. For most of the last decade, more people moved out of Mississippi each year than moved in. That trend has now reversed. Net domestic in-migration turned positive in 2024 for the first time in this dataset's recent history. How did this happen? Through a deliberate sequence of conservative policy reforms, each of which was resisted at the time as too ambitious or too politically risky. Labor market reform in 2021 made it easier for workers to train and to move between careers. The 2022 shift from a progressive tax code to a flat tax was followed in 2025 by the historic elimination of the state income tax altogether — a policy that, only a few years before, had been dismissed by serious people as politically impossible. Education funding reform in 2024 finally tied the money to the child rather than the system. And in 2026, lawmakers have begun to take on the thicket of red tape that has held back the state's healthcare economy. The lesson is not that policy change is easy. It is that it requires sustained effort. Ideas do not turn into law without people willing to fight for them. Sycophancy might get an advocate into the signing ceremony. It takes robust advocacy to ensure that there is a bill to be signed in the first place. Other states are now beginning to study what has worked here. Mississippi has been described, fairly, as a natural experiment in governance — and the experiment is producing results that deserve attention. The work is not done. Several of the policy changes are recent enough that their full effects will take years to show up in the data. The challenge for Mississippi now is to keep going, rather than assume the rankings will continue to climb on their own. But the direction of travel is clear. A state that was once treated as a cautionary tale is now becoming a case study. Douglas Carswell, President of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy, authored this post.
This post is a paid advertisement by the Mississippi Center for Public Policy.
9 comments:
Mississippi is better of than the uk
Keep it quiet. We don't want the vermin infestation from the big shitties
Right Wing Interest Group Declares Right Wing Policies Great
"Economic powerhouse Arkansas (Median Income $30k) is destroying economic sh*thole California (Median income $50k)," says right wing group leader.
I only we were actually tackling the state's healthcare economy. Instead we have a governor who refuses to be transparent about how we are spending 200 million dollars from the federal government on rural health. And we only have one academic medical center without competition and almost all other healthcare is out of state based.
You have to take into account the cost of housing, taxes, and energy, as well as food, etc. The raw income numbers are not very meaningful without look at the disposable income. Cost of living index for California is 142.3 Arkansas is 89.6.
In general terms, none of the people know jack-shit about which they speak. I cannot help recall Warren Buffett - "any company who has an economist on the payroll has at least one employee too many..." And moreso, Charlie Munger - "economists don't know a damned thing so they don't add a damned thing to the value of a company..." As that relates here, a guy paid to write fluffy things about Mississippi's economy would be falling down on the job he was paid to do if he didn't write fluffy things about it. What is technically accurate does not translate into meaningful on any level.
1:29 PM, can you imagine how powerful and positive the changes would have been had voters NOT been electing members of the Democrat purposeful Crime Party in cities like Jackson, MS and Bennie Thompson’s congressional district, for many, many decades?
The Democrat purposeful Crime Party creates these high crime poverty disaster areas then blames someone or something else. Malcom X warned us about what we would have with whitey Democrats…and Robert L “Bob” Woodward has told what did happen. But those poor ____ voters keeping touching that stove eye.
I live here. Stats either lie or it’s so bad, you don’t notice the improvement. When a penny stock doubles, it is still only worth 2 cents. Quality of life here sucks. Healthcare sucks. Eldercare sucks. Shopping sucks. Unless u are “in the club”, u are wasting ur time here. The only thing nice here is the countryside.
"...can you imagine how powerful and positive the changes would have been had voters NOT been electing members of the Democrat purposeful Crime Party in cities like Jackson, MS and Bennie Thompson’s congressional district, for many, many decades?"
Speaking of "many decades," I wonder how many know that Mississippi was Nixon's biggest win in 1972 but it went for Carter in 1976. Or that Trent Lott was a Democrat until 1972, as was his mentor Bill Colmer, and as was John Stennis. Unfortunately the vast majority in Mississippi then and now isn't really Dem or GOP, they are just ignorant and not interested in much more than their own immediate wants. Just exactly like the vast majority of those for whom they vote.
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