The U.S. House of Representatives voted Monday evening to increase the second round of federal direct payments to Americans from $600 to $2,000. (Photo by Lenin Nolly/Sipa USA)(Sipa via AP Images)
The U.S. House of Representatives voted Monday evening to increase the second round of federal direct payments to Americans from $600 to $2,000 — an action demanded by President Donald Trump in recent days as he threatened to veto the larger stimulus plan.
Nearly every House Democrat, including Mississippi Congressman Bennie Thompson, voted on Monday to increase the direct checks to Americans. They were joined by 44 Republicans, meeting a two-thirds threshold needed for the resolution to pass.
But 130 Republicans — including Mississippi Reps. Trent Kelly, Michael Guest and Steven Palazzo — voted against the measure.
The House’s move comes a day after Trump signed an earlier passed $2.3 trillion coronavirus relief package. The president threatened a veto of that package for several days, demanding on social media over the weekend that Congress — the Democratic-controlled House and the Republican-controlled Senate — increase direct payments from $600 to $2,000 per individual.
The procedural resolution passed by the House on Monday now moves to the Senate, where it will also require a two-thirds vote.
It is unclear if the Senate will even take up the House proposal, Politico reports, despite Trump insisting Sunday night he had secured an agreement from Republican leaders to do so.
Mississippi Republican Sens. Roger Wicker and Cindy Hyde-Smith rejected earlier calls for higher direct payments to individuals.
A stack of cash — money that noncustodial parents paid to help care for their kids — sat unsupervised on a table in the middle of a room at Mississippi’s child support disbursement unit.
Local government contractor Rob Wells encountered the scene in 2010 when he visited the office to look for ways to improve a deeply flawed and antiquated system overseen by the Mississippi Department of Human Services.
The unit was responsible for intaking child support money, a debt the state imposes mostly on separated fathers, and issuing it to the correct family.
Many mothers had complained of long delays in receiving the funds. Wells knew about this because his company ran the call center where parents could call for help on their cases.
At the office, Wells spoke to the sole worker tasked with solving “exceptions,” which occur when the unit receives payment but can’t immediately identify its corresponding case in the state computer system.
If she couldn’t find the right case in three minutes, she would send the flagged entry to a separate floor, where another worker would pick up the queue. So Wells journeyed upstairs to find that employee.
“They said, ‘We don’t know what you’re talking about,’” he said.
The incomplete computer entries were stranded in the ether, along with millions and millions of child support dollars that could have been used on food, clothing, housing and health care for children of separated parents.
In over twelve hours of interviews with Wells for this investigative series, he told Mississippi Today that he and his staff worked for a year and a half to clear the backlog.
Once that was solved, the state eventually let his $100 million a year corporation modernize and operate the enforcement side of the child support program — a public service that’s been financially strangled and largely neglected by state leaders.
Years before the state outsourced virtually all facets of the office, Mississippi had a haphazard child support program — the worst in the nation by many measurements, in large part because of severe underfunding. Mississippi could hang its hat only on an extraordinary cost efficiency score, because of how little the state spent to run it.
Despite it’s still paltry budget, the program has improved its ranking in most of the federal performance metrics that reflect how smoothly the gears of the agency are turning.
But the poorest state in the country is always going to have a harder time extracting money from its residents, which goes far in explaining why Mississippi still ranks dead last for its rate of collections. The office collected and disbursed 54% of the money currently ordered to custodial parents in the program in 2019 — at about the same rate as it did a decade ago — compared to 66% nationwide. The total amount of past child support owed has continued to grow, totaling $1.6 billion in 2019.
Any technical improvements made by the deeply complex and often misunderstood program, which touches half of kids in the state, haven’t minimized scrutiny from the public officials and advocates at all familiar with it.
“I have a great lede for you,” Sen. Hob Bryan, D-Amory, told Mississippi Today when the publication reached out to him about this series. “The child support system in Mississippi is f-cked up, and no one knows how to unf-ck it.”
Here’s how it’s supposed to work: A separated parent, usually a mom, who needs help collecting child support from a noncustodial parent applies to the state’s child support enforcement program by mailing in an application and a $25 fee. Other moms are forced into the program when they try to apply for assistance.
The child support division of the Mississippi Department of Human Services then creates a case and starts by identifying the child’s parents. If a child’s birth certificate only contains the mother’s name, for example, the state helps track down the father and facilitate a paternity test.
A staff attorney then secures a support order — a legally binding document that spells out how much a noncustodial parent must pay each month — from the local chancery court.
Next, the state has several enforcement and collection measures it can take. For parents who have jobs, the state can investigate their employment and seek wage or unemployment benefit withholding and tax refund offsets. The state collects about 80% of child support this way.
Collecting the rest from the many Mississippians with nontraditional or unstable employment is tougher. After locating the parent, caseworkers can try to level with them, to convince them to pay voluntarily. Otherwise, the state may choose to suspend the parent’s driver’s license until they pay, file a contempt order in the case, take the parent to court and potentially put them behind bars.
The federal government created the child support enforcement program within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration for Children and Families in 1975 primarily as a way to spread the societal financial responsibility of caring for families on welfare, which were mostly those headed by single mothers, to the fathers.
Child Support is one of Mississippi Department of Human Services’ largest divisions, and nationally, the anti-poverty program touches more families, especially men, for a longer period of time than nearly any other social program.
Single-parent households are one significant determinant of poverty in the state and nation. Women-headed families with minor children, where no husband is present, are about five times more likely to live in poverty than married-parent families, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
But for decades at the child support office, stacks of paperwork that single mothers submitted in hopes of receiving some help sat ignored in banana boxes.
Empty folders served as placeholders for cases — some 10, 15 years old — that the state had never taken to court. Out of all families who were seeking the state’s help in 2010, only a little over half of their cases contained support orders.
No support order meant there was nothing for the state to enforce.
Many mothers also complained of long lags between the time their child’s father paid into the program and when they received the funds and a lack of proper accounting, leaving them unable to track how much they were receiving or owed.
In short, the system was broken.
As is still true for many government agencies and courts today, the child support division had not digitized all of its cases, so processes to move them through the system could not be automated.
The state did not employ enough people to do the manual functions needed to manage the load. Mississippi was typically spending under $100 per case per year, compared to almost $400 nationally, according to a Mississippi Today analysis of federal data.
Though Mississippi receives a generous 2-to-1 match in federal dollars to operate the program, officials say the agency never allocated the budget the child support office needed to bulk up its staff. During a time when the Legislature was looking to cut state government, increased funding to this niche program was the last thing on lawmakers’ minds.
But right in the agency’s backyard, there was an attorney who believed he knew the fix.
Wells, a Yazoo City-native attorney, had started a Jackson law firm specializing in the delivery of child support services in the early 1990’s after he watched a similar firm called Maximus try to secure work in the state.
In the following 20 years, more and more states, including Mississippi, began contracting out certain functions within their child support programs, such as call centers and disbursement units. Wells’ company, YoungWilliams, eventually became one of a handful of primary companies conducting this work nationally.
By 2015, the Mississippi Department of Human Services sought something new: a completely privatized child support enforcement office — though early studies suggested that these contracts produced mixed results.
“The significant additional cost of privatization would outweigh the potential additional benefits,” the Joint Legislative Committee on Performance Evaluation and Expenditure Review (PEER), the legislative watchdog, wrote in a 2013 report that examined the potential of outsourcing the child support program.
After winning a competitive bid, YoungWilliams started with a pilot program in 2015 and began running case management across all county offices in 2016. The company extended job offers to all existing state workers. Separately, the Department of Human Services contracted out the disbursement unit to another firm.
“I think the state has to strike a good balance of recognizing what does the state do well and where they need help whenever they’re considering privatizing,” said former child support program director Lyndsy Irwin, who took over after the initial pilot and left the agency in September. “… being able to leverage the technology that a vendor has to offer in the area of weakness for the agency.”
Republican state leaders have increasingly pushed for government privatization with the belief that having private companies operate public programs results in better quality and more cost efficient services. However, public policy researchers say privatization more often increases inequity in an economy with a growing opportunity gap.
YoungWilliams was going to have to find a way to fix a floundering program without any more money. The company would have to keep the operation lean, but luckily, it also had the capital from its work in other states to invest millions into developing specialized software and building a new child support enforcement infrastructure in Mississippi.
It implemented its signature computer program called Y-Trac, which continually populates “tasks” for caseworkers to complete within the child support system. The Mississippi Enforcement Tracking of Support System, the system of record, was where state workers had been managing cases. It’s a legacy system, characterized by its black screen and lime green lettering, that made a slog out of performing basic tasks, data entry and pushing cases along.
The new technology made it possible for YoungWilliams to centralize case management, and it eventually closed about 60 physical child support offices, roughly three-fourths of them, across the state.
Wells has gotten the quality control software down to a science: He knows how many fewer seconds it takes a worker to complete a certain task — processing a wage withholding or entering biographical information from a client — in his system versus the old one.
“Without Y-Trac we would be flying blind,” Wells said.
This also makes for a cutthroat work environment, two former YoungWilliams employees told Mississippi Today, with each employee working large loads. The company places cameras in each office, where executive staff may beam in at any time. Corporate leadership can log in to its computer system and view exactly how long a caseworker was inside Y-Trac, how quickly they entered information and how their performance compared to their peers.
These factors are perhaps why even as the contractor was making improvements, it was still able to reduce the program’s already limited staff 15% from 515 in 2015 to 438 in 2019, which reflect national trends, according to the most recent federal report.
The program reinvention resulted in a decrease in overall child support cases, Wells said, as YoungWilliams identified old cases that needed to be closed. The state is still spending just $165 per case — and that’s counting a budget hike in 2019 — compared to $442 nationally.
But now, instead of boxes of empty files, the office has secured court orders in 84% of child support cases. The rate of cases with established paternity rose from 94% in 2015 to 98% in 2019. Collections, as a dollar amount, are increasing even as the caseload is dropping.
The office of child support enforcement helped pump about $340 million into the households of children with separated parents in Mississippi in 2019, compared to $268 million in 2010.
While the state recorded $11.9 million in undistributed child support dollars at the end of 2019, just 12 percent were any more than a year old. Mississippi is one of only five states that does not have any undistributed collections more than five years old.
For the program’s improvements, Wells said he credits state agency leaders like Irwin and Walley Nalor, former child support directors, “taking careful risks and trying against all odds and barriers to fix something nobody was screaming to fix.”
With its current funding, Wells claims the program, with its new sophisticated infrastructure and increasing automation, can continue performing its basic functions at a reasonable rate. It will continue to petition courts, locate fathers, garnish paychecks and intercept tax refunds where those avenues exist.
After that, he said, the current program and its collection rate will only improve as much as economic circumstances and the conditions of Mississippians’ lives do.
But the service could conceivably go further. With the existing wide net of the child support program, the welfare agency has an opportunity to connect with men it might not otherwise, to identify their needs and barriers, and to offer counseling and workforce training.
This would follow a national trend, an attempted shift in philosophy away from punishing and shaming unwed fathers to uplifting them. And while YoungWilliams says it’s eager to take that approach, this kind of outreach costs money — the type of funding that’s never even been on the table.
Wells says he’s never had much pull with Human Services and that the agency doesn’t confer with him on policy changes, contract language or recommendations to the Legislature — which could be considered an appropriate distance for a state contractor to have with his client.
From the CEO’s perspective, he’s not a tycoon or a consultant so much as a government plumber.
To appreciate the work of contractors like YoungWilliams is to understand the complex “plumbing,” as Wells puts it, of public services. Everyone wants their sewer to work, but few care to peek at the pipes beneath the soil to see how.
Wells, a wealthy and undoubtedly influential figure, and his company simply exist below the surface of state government, tinkering away on the lines.
While lots of people have gripes with the child support office, he says few with any power to invest in improvements have had the time or will to wade into the mud with him — try as he might.
“Bureaucracy that’s underfunded doesn’t work,” Wells said. “The people who are in public office care … They want to listen and they want solutions. It’s just, it’s so hard to make happen.”
This story is part one of a series examining Mississippi’s child support enforcement program. Parts two and three will publish later this week.
Harper Davis carries the ball for Mississippi State University.
This was before Julius Harper Davis became Mr. Mississippi State and a standout on some of the greatest Bulldog football teams in history. This was before Davis played for the Chicago Bears and Green Bay Packers, and before the legendary George Halas named a play after him.
This was long before Davis coached as an assistant at Mississippi State and then for 25 years with great success as head coach at Millsaps College. This was before all that. This was when Harper Davis was just 18 years young, a recent graduate of Clarksdale High, and found himself across the continent in the mammoth Los Angeles Coliseum lined up across from the UCLA Bruins.
This was October of 1944 and America was still fighting World War II. Davis was in the Navy, stationed at St. Mary’s Preflight where his astonishing foot speed proved much more apparent on the football field than in a cockpit.
Davis, who died Saturday at 95, once showed me the news clipping from the next day’s Los Angeles Times, which ran an eight-column banner headline across the top of the first page of the sports section: St. Mary’s Preflight Jolts Bruins 21 to 12; Davis gallops over Uclans.
Rick Cleveland
The story details how Julie Davis ran for 206 yards on 31 carries and dazzled heavily favored UCLA. Davis was described as an “18-year-old newcomer from the Mississippi prep ranks whose arrival has transformed the Preflighters from plodders into dazzlers.”
“All these years later, it remains my biggest thrill in sports,” Davis told me in 1989 after he retired at Millsaps.
And that was saying something because Harper Davis, older brother of fellow Mississippi State great Art Davis, enjoyed a lifetime of thrills in sports.
He led Mississippi State in scoring in three of his four seasons, led them to 25 wins against 12 defeats, made All-SEC and All-South. As good as he was on offense, he was best in the defensive secondary.
The Pittsburgh Steelers drafted him in the second round of the NFL Draft, but the Los Angeles Dons, who played in the LA Coliseum, drafted him in the first round of the All-America Football Conference draft. The Dons offered him more money, plus Davis was familiar with the surroundings.
Davis signed with the Dons but after one season the league folded. The NFL held a dispersal draft and the Bears, coached and owned by Halas, chose Davis in the first round. Davis became a defensive star, intercepting five passes during the 1950 season. Halas also designed an offensive play featuring Davis as a wide receiver, who would get the ball on a double reverse. The Bears ran it once and Davis scored from 40 yards out. Afterward, Halas revealed the play’s name: The Harper Davis Special.
Brothers Art (left) and Harper Davis, in 2011.
What wasn’t special about the Bears was the payroll. As a coach, Halas was innovative. As an owner, he was miserly. Davis said players often had to mend their own uniforms. He was making $8,000 a season.
Young fans of today’s NFL can scarcely imagine what the league was like in the early 1950s. When Harper and Camille Davis welcomed a young son into the world in 1953, he sought some financial stability. Davis quit pro football to become the head coach at West Point High School. “I had to work toward a future and there was no future in pro football,” Davis told me.
After two years as a high school coach, Davis spent eight as an assistant at State. In 1964, he landed at Millsaps for a 25-year run, during which the Majors won 136 games, lost 84 and tied four. His 1980 team finished 9-0. He was old school, Harper Davis was. Offensively, his teams most often ran between the tackles. Defensively, they got after you. They practiced long and hard. Nobody, including Davis, drank water during practice.
Mostly, they won.
When he retired, I asked him, are you going to miss it? “I probably will,” he said, and he did.
It wasn’t long before he was volunteering to help Jackson Academy’s junior high teams learn to play the sport.
“He was great with the kids, one of the neatest, kindest people I’ve ever known,” said Joey Hawkins, long-time JA coach.
Hawkins reminded me of another Harper Davis exploit from years and years ago. World War II had ended. Mississippi State and Ole Miss both wanted him to play for them and awaited his return. But Mississippi State didn’t wait. Coach Allyn McKeen took action, dispatching an assistant coach to pick up Davis at Corpus Christi Naval Air Station. That was on a Wednesday. They drove back to Mississippi on Thursday with Davis studying the playbook. On Friday, State traveled to Birmingham to play Auburn. On Saturday, Davis, who barely knew his teammates, entered the scoreless game in the second quarter. His first carry was a 61-yard touchdown. Eventually, he would then rush for 166 yards on 22 carries and score two of State’s three touchdowns in a 20-0 victory.
You couldn’t make up a story like that. And thankfully, where Harper Davis is concerned, we don’t have to.
COVID-19 cases: Mississippi reports 1,701 new cases
By Mississippi Today | December 28, 2020
We are bringing you the latest COVID-19 Mississippi trends with daily case, death and hospitalization updates, as well as testing data charts and other helpful interactive maps and graphs.
This page was last updated Monday, December 28:
New cases: 1,701 | New Deaths: 28
Total Hospitalizations: 1,377
Total cases:208,089|Total Deaths: 4,634
Mask Mandates | On Sept. 30, Gov. Tate Reeves ended the statewide mask mandate order, originally issued Aug. 4. Since then, he has added a total of 78 individual county mask mandates, covering half of the state. State health officials encourage widespread masking and credit the original mandate with helping cases improve after a steep summer spike. View the full list of COVID-19 orders here.
On Tuesday Mississippi hit a new record with the seven-day average for cases, reaching 2,196. After going nine months without reporting 2,000 cases in a day, the state has reached that point nine times in just the 16 days of December so far.
On Dec. 9, Mississippi also hit a new high for total hospitalizations on the rolling average, surpassing the summer peak. The state had already reached a new high for confirmed hospitalizations at the end of November, but hadn’t yet for the total tally, which includes suspected cases as well.
As seen in MSDH’s illness onset chart, the record for most illnesses in a day — Dec. 11, with 2,442 — is within the last two-week period, meaning those numbers could still go up.
Mississippi’s present rise in cases mirrors the national surge, as the state currently has the 26th most new cases per capita. According to the Harvard Global Health Institute tracker, every state except Vermont is now in the “red zone” (recording over 25 daily new cases per 100,000 people).
The health department reports that 148,466 people are presumed covered as of Dec. 13.
Click through the links below to view our interactive charts describing the trends around the coronavirus in Mississippi:
MOUND BAYOU — When Eulah Peterson was elected mayor here in 2017, she not only assumed the duties of the office but also inherited more than half a million dollars in debt.
Mound Bayou, a small town in Bolivar County, had accumulated $717,826.06 in debt to the IRS, Entergy, and 18 other entities. Peterson said she doesn’t know what happened in prior administrations to lead to this debt.
“They just didn’t pay the bills, as far as I know,” she said.
Peterson continued: “These were all bills that we inherited that were on the books from prior administrations. When I came in (to office) I was told, ‘It does not matter that you didn’t make the bills. You are the person in charge and the city is responsible for the bills.’”
So she went about the business of working with the board of aldermen to create a plan to pay if off.
Peterson said the city has now paid down 84% of its debts through fundraisers, tax anticipation loans, and allocations from the city general fund.
“We’re very, very proud that the board and I have worked to get this $603,958.70 paid off and in addition to that, all of our bills are current. We don’t have any bills that we’re not paying.” Peterson said.
It is not unheard of for small, rural towns to find themselves in this kind of debt.
Hope Policy Institute Director Diane Standaert said that lack of wealth in some rural, small towns can be understood through the lens of policies that have historically divested from these kinds of places.
“Generally, the big picture of smaller town finances is not disconnected from what’s happened in the region in terms of the history of extraction and exclusionary policies and practices. (That includes not) only extractive policies but a divestment, and not getting resources whether it be philanthropic public or private dollars into these communities on an ongoing basis,” Standaert said.
Willie Simmons, central district transportation commissioner and former state senator of more than 26 years representing the Delta, agreed that state and national policies have tended to not prioritize small-town economic development.
Vickie D. King/Mississippi Today
Standing near the former home of Mound Bayou founder Isaiah Montgomery, Mayor Eulah Peterson describes how during more prosperous times, the train travelled through the center of town past the founder’s house.
Rural Mississippi — especially the Delta — lacks the necessary infrastructure to attract and maintain a thriving population. With a loss of population, so goes economic development, employment opportunities and new business.
“We have to rethink what we have done in the past if we want to have a holistic state, if we want to have a holistic nation,” Simmons said. “We have to invest in those communities that we may have neglected in the past due to public policies and population migration, and begin to invest in those communities so that they can grow.”
Though these types of policies are not the sole reason for Mound Bayou’s debt, they have played a role in what the city couldn’t afford to do while paying it off. And now that the town is mostly out of debt, Peterson said the town can prioritize infrastructure projects.
She wants to fix the streets and sewer systems as well as revitalize the community center. This June she plans to run for re-election so she can continue on the work she’s started. If not successful, she’ll continue to push for the rest of the debt to get paid off before the new mayor comes into office.
“It became a goal of mine to not have a new administration come in with these debts over their heads,” Peterson said.
Just a couple hours after lawmakers voted to remove the state flag featuring the Confederate battle emblem, Mississippi Today’s political reporters huddled in a conference room on the fourth floor of the Mississippi Capitol to debrief and think back on the wild weeks leading up to that vote.
In the final week of 2020, Mississippi Today re-airs that podcast — our favorite episode of the year.
We are bringing you the latest COVID-19 Mississippi trends with daily case, death and hospitalization updates, as well as testing data charts and other helpful interactive maps and graphs.
This page was last updated Sunday, December 27:
New cases: 1,365 | New Deaths: 41
Total Hospitalizations: 1,377
Total cases:206,388|Total Deaths: 4,606
Mask Mandates | On Sept. 30, Gov. Tate Reeves ended the statewide mask mandate order, originally issued Aug. 4. Since then, he has added a total of 78 individual county mask mandates, covering half of the state. State health officials encourage widespread masking and credit the original mandate with helping cases improve after a steep summer spike. View the full list of COVID-19 orders here.
On Tuesday Mississippi hit a new record with the seven-day average for cases, reaching 2,196. After going nine months without reporting 2,000 cases in a day, the state has reached that point nine times in just the 16 days of December so far.
On Dec. 9, Mississippi also hit a new high for total hospitalizations on the rolling average, surpassing the summer peak. The state had already reached a new high for confirmed hospitalizations at the end of November, but hadn’t yet for the total tally, which includes suspected cases as well.
As seen in MSDH’s illness onset chart, the record for most illnesses in a day — Dec. 11, with 2,442 — is within the last two-week period, meaning those numbers could still go up.
Mississippi’s present rise in cases mirrors the national surge, as the state currently has the 26th most new cases per capita. According to the Harvard Global Health Institute tracker, every state except Vermont is now in the “red zone” (recording over 25 daily new cases per 100,000 people).
The health department reports that 148,466 people are presumed covered as of Dec. 13.
Click through the links below to view our interactive charts describing the trends around the coronavirus in Mississippi:
Eric J. Shelton, Mississippi Today/ Report for America
State Capitol in Jackson Friday, August 24, 2018.
States that consume the most sushi per capita have a higher work force participation rate than Mississippi.
But wait, states where more venison is eaten also have a higher percentage of eligible works employed than in Mississippi.
No actual research has been done on those statistics, but rest assured they are correct. After all, every state, except for perhaps West Virginia, has a higher work force participation rate than the Magnolia State.
There have been efforts in recent days to buoy support for Gov. Tate Reeves’ proposal to phase out Mississippi’s income tax by pointing out that the nine states with no tax on earned income have higher — much higher in some instances — work force participation rates than Mississippi. It’s an interesting point, but states with the highest tax on income also have higher work force participation rates than Mississippi. The point is: Mississippi’s work force participation rate is lower than every state except that of West Virginia.
Still, the argument made that eliminating the income tax would help improve Mississippi’s work force participation rate is an interesting one since Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann has made improving the state’s work force participation one of his primary goals. Hosemann, as do most economists, cite improving the rate as a way to improve the economy of a state.
In order to steer a proposal to phase out the income tax through the 2021 Mississippi legislative session, which begins Jan. 5, Reeves probably needs buy-in on the plan from Hosemann, who presides over the Senate.
House Speaker Philip Gunn has previously voiced support for eliminating the income tax and appears to be solidly behind Reeves’ proposal to do so during the 2021 session. When asked about the proposal, Hosemann simply said “everything is on the table.” Perhaps the thought is that if the income tax phase-out is linked to increasing Mississippi’s work force participation rate, Hosemann might be more likely to jump on board.
In fairness, the work force participation rates of many of the nine states that do not tax earned income are above the national average. Based on information provided by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the national work force participation rate for November was 61.4%. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, it was above 63%. Mississippi’s was at 55.8%, seasonally adjusted for November. Of the nine states with no tax on earned income, six were above the national average. The states with the highest work force participation rate of that group were South Dakota at 67.9% followed by New Hampshire at 66.3%.
But, of course, most of the states with work force rates higher than the national average have a personal income tax, most with much higher rates than Mississippi’s relatively low rate. They include Maryland with a 65.8% work force participation rate and Minnesota at 67.9%.
Incidentally, Kansas had a 68.3% rate in November. In the early 2010s, Kansas famously enacted deep income tax cuts but repealed them in 2018 as state revenue plummeted.
When announcing his plan, Reeves said Mississippi needed the boost that the income tax cut would create.
“We as a state need to think big,” Reeves said in November. “We need to think about not only what can we do to make strategic investments, but what can we do to make a splash.
“What can we do to say to the world not only do we want to invest capital here, (but) we want you to move here? Mississippi needs to see population growth in the coming years. We need more people moving into the state to grow our economy.”
He said phasing out the income tax by 2030 would spur that growth.
Reeves said the states with no tax on personal income are experiencing faster population growth. Many are. The top 10 fastest growing states between 2010 and 2019 include four with no income tax. All nine were growing much faster than Mississippi, which was in the bottom 10 in terms of population growth.
In most categories, measuring a state’s economic vitality — gross domestic product, per capital income, education attainment and so on — most states with or without a personal income tax are ahead of Mississippi.
Former Gov. William Winter, who died earlier this month, used to famously say, “The only road out of poverty runs past the schoolhouse door.”
No doubt, those states that have had strong school systems for a prolonged period and have high educational attainment levels also are outperforming Mississippi economically.
Some of those states do not have a personal income tax, but most do.
We are bringing you the latest COVID-19 Mississippi trends with daily case, death and hospitalization updates, as well as testing data charts and other helpful interactive maps and graphs.
This page was last updated Saturday, December 26:
New cases: 845| New Deaths: 3
Total Hospitalizations: 1,377
Total cases:205,023|Total Deaths: 4,565
Mask Mandates | On Sept. 30, Gov. Tate Reeves ended the statewide mask mandate order, originally issued Aug. 4. Since then, he has added a total of 78 individual county mask mandates, covering half of the state. State health officials encourage widespread masking and credit the original mandate with helping cases improve after a steep summer spike. View the full list of COVID-19 orders here.
On Tuesday Mississippi hit a new record with the seven-day average for cases, reaching 2,196. After going nine months without reporting 2,000 cases in a day, the state has reached that point nine times in just the 16 days of December so far.
On Dec. 9, Mississippi also hit a new high for total hospitalizations on the rolling average, surpassing the summer peak. The state had already reached a new high for confirmed hospitalizations at the end of November, but hadn’t yet for the total tally, which includes suspected cases as well.
As seen in MSDH’s illness onset chart, the record for most illnesses in a day — Dec. 11, with 2,442 — is within the last two-week period, meaning those numbers could still go up.
Mississippi’s present rise in cases mirrors the national surge, as the state currently has the 26th most new cases per capita. According to the Harvard Global Health Institute tracker, every state except Vermont is now in the “red zone” (recording over 25 daily new cases per 100,000 people).
The health department reports that 148,466 people are presumed covered as of Dec. 13.
Click through the links below to view our interactive charts describing the trends around the coronavirus in Mississippi:
We are bringing you the latest COVID-19 Mississippi trends with daily case, death and hospitalization updates, as well as testing data charts and other helpful interactive maps and graphs.
This page was last updated Friday, December 25:
New cases: 1,527| New Deaths: 6
Total Hospitalizations: 1,377
Total cases:204,178|Total Deaths: 4,562
Mask Mandates | On Sept. 30, Gov. Tate Reeves ended the statewide mask mandate order, originally issued Aug. 4. Since then, he has added a total of 78 individual county mask mandates, covering half of the state. State health officials encourage widespread masking and credit the original mandate with helping cases improve after a steep summer spike. View the full list of COVID-19 orders here.
On Tuesday Mississippi hit a new record with the seven-day average for cases, reaching 2,196. After going nine months without reporting 2,000 cases in a day, the state has reached that point nine times in just the 16 days of December so far.
On Dec. 9, Mississippi also hit a new high for total hospitalizations on the rolling average, surpassing the summer peak. The state had already reached a new high for confirmed hospitalizations at the end of November, but hadn’t yet for the total tally, which includes suspected cases as well.
As seen in MSDH’s illness onset chart, the record for most illnesses in a day — Dec. 11, with 2,442 — is within the last two-week period, meaning those numbers could still go up.
Mississippi’s present rise in cases mirrors the national surge, as the state currently has the 26th most new cases per capita. According to the Harvard Global Health Institute tracker, every state except Vermont is now in the “red zone” (recording over 25 daily new cases per 100,000 people).
The health department reports that 148,466 people are presumed covered as of Dec. 13.
Click through the links below to view our interactive charts describing the trends around the coronavirus in Mississippi:
