Mississippi: Not Exactly Paradise

Mississippi is a very backward state. It ranks last among all US states in so many things, like educational levels, obesity, and percentage of people who smoke.

According to an article in 247wallstreet.com,

In nearly every metric associated with poverty, education, employment, health risk, and insurance coverage, Mississippi has been close to the bottom for years.

I'm always saying that people who think they should not pay taxes or who don't like government programs that help the poor should go live in Mississippi. It's the very opposite of a country like Norway, where the taxes are very high but the government provides nearly everything anyone wants or needs. (That all sounds good to me, but it's what conservative Americans call "socialism," and socialism is felt by these same people to be a very damning epithet.)

Mississippi also has been a state with poor racial equality and a lot of bigotry and intolerance in general. It's the state where three civil rights workers from the North—two white and one black—were murdered in 1963. It's also the state where a young black teenager from Chicago was brutally murdered for allegedly whistling at a white woman. (His killers were acquitted by an all-white jury, and later admitted their guilt but could not be retried because of the US legal protection against "double jeopardy.")

At about that time I visited Mississippi myself, and I said to myself at the time, "If ever there's a place that looks like it's been cursed by God, this is it." Driving from Mississippi into next-door Alabama, Alabama looks like paradise--but that's only by comparison.

All this was nearly 50 years ago. That's quite a while, and some things might have changed. Quite possibly you can no longer get away with killing black people there. Still, I think that Mississippi was always basically an agrarian state, with its economy based on slavery. It never recovered from the Civil War and the direct ravages of that war, and the emancipation of the slaves. When I was there, 100 years after the Civil War, it was still a very blighted-looking place. And we see that today, 150 years after the Civil War, it's still very poor.

Mississippi's very poor material and economic welfare and its poor education doubtless go hand-in-hand. The two are inextricably related. Poor education is a cause of poor prosperity, and lack of tax receipts to pay for education in turn will result in poor education, so the two mutually reinforce one another.

Also, people's attitudes have a lot to do with their level of education. Mississippi may very well continue to have backward racial and other attitudes due to its lack of education.

Another state that lately has been much in the news with things like wanting to teach Creationism in its schools instead of evolution and passing anti-gay laws, is Tennessee. In the same 247wallstreet.com article, Tennessee ranks as the third-poorest state. Other notably backward states like West Virginia and Kentucky also ranked among the 10 poorest.

Read more: America’s Poorest States - 24/7 Wall St. http://247wallst.com/2011/09/14/americas-poorest-states/#ixzz1Y3KNnMyJ

Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein

Populace and Paradox

The voting faction of the US populace—the electorate—frequently does not seem to think very clearly. Everybody wants government-provided services, and nobody favors taxes. How do they think those services are going to be provided for? Where is the government to get the money it needs to provide services, if not from taxpayers' taxes?

Maybe people should bear in mind two extremes and think about which one they'd like better. On the one hand, Sweden is the very model of the welfare state, with health care and many other services taken care of at government expense. Concomitant with that, taxes in Sweden are high.

You could take Mississippi as the other extreme. Government expenditures, for example on education, are low. As a result, Mississippi ranks low on a lot of measures—education, health of its citizens, etc. Also directly connected, Mississippi has low taxes—and a low standard of living. Maybe when government money is spent, that money circulates and makes everybody more prosperous.

Also, polls show that the populace disapproves of Congress. Congress gets a 17% approval rating. On the other hand, when people were polled for their opinion of their own representative, 45% approved. (And historically, nearly 96% of House members get re-elected.) How can the individual congressmen be good and the collective body be bad? Maybe this has to do with a phenomenon I blogged about before: people decry pork-barrel legislation (or "pork") when some other congressman is doing it. When their own congressman is doing it, it's "bringing home federal funds to our district." I see that phrase in the materials that my own congressman sends to his constituents. A verb declension: He's advocating pork, you're not careful with the people's money, I'm helping my district. (Like "He's a tightwad, you're cheap, I'm thrifty.")

Copyright © 2010 by Richard Stein