Also, do things that make family formation easier and enjoyable. The 35 and under crowd is really well behaved and responsible. They may embrace some liberal political ideas but they personally behave like conservatives. Educated, 35 and under Americans don't drink copious amounts, don't do drugs and they like living in nice neighborhoods. I'm not into the announce your pronouns stuff but other than that, they make good neighbors and they keep their places neat and tidy.
Buy / Sell: Mississippi's economy is in a 'death spiral'
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2020 changed a lot for people. People decide to chase jobs and dreams. One some got extra money. Some got really good deals to sell homes. Lots of available jobs coming out of pandemic because so many left jobs retired or just were never filled because of issues the pandemic brought. For us it was about growth for jobs especially in stem. Ms is very bad about the good ole boy system. If you grew up in that town went to church with someone you were more than likely fast tracked for better positions, colleges in the area tend to higher their own rather than people from the outside. Hospitals included. They aren't doing a very good job of attracting those from the outside to come and stay. There is better jobs with more growth opportunities elsewhere on top of better quality of life from things to do, schools, etc. unless you really like the country way of life. I think you can do that easier and cheaper in ms. But then again, unless you came into land through family. You still have to be able to afford it some how.
I've seen a lot more Mississippi plates around DFW the last couple of years. I try check the county in case it's from an area I'm familiar with.
I assume a lot of them aren't just visiting.
Actually, Mississippi is not a bad place to retire. If you need to rely on some additional income outside of SS and savings, not so much , but life can still be enjoyable here otherwise.
Don't fool yourself. Every state mooches off the Feds. They just do it differently. The Blue State have really high property tax that goes to the state and written off by their citizens on the Federal income tax. Same amount of money just mooched differently.
Seems proportional to me. Say.....make a lot more money in California. However, the COL in Cali is a lot more expensive than MS. I like MS because we're not over run with too much population, but I would be willing to cap out at about 5 million. I like the more laid back lifestyle we have here.
Also, Memphis is getting so bad with crime and lawlessness.... desoto county may grow from the exodus of Memphians but I can't see Memphis being a desirable destination for Mississippi college graduates in the future. I'm definitely telling my kids to go to Nashville or east TN or NW Arkansas.
MS best hope (in the north) is Tupelo.
MS best hope (in the north) is Tupelo.
Certain parts of Memphis are pretty bad, but there are other areas very nice to live in. Tons of jobs in Shelby County.....and with the new Ford Assy. plant nearing completion in nearby Stanton, TN, there's gonna be a boat load of job opportunities out there. I would hope a lot of our engineering and business grads would take a look at the new Blue Oval project. Gonna bring in 6,000 direct jobs and up to 25,000 jobs from suppliers locating there.
Yes. I'm well aware. But those nice areas are experiencing more and more crime. The Popular corridor is still nice, but don't leave a thing in your car. Then there was the shootout at the Popular Kroger recently and in Germantown last year.
Yes, Blue oval is a nice pick up for..... Tipton, Haywood and Fayette county. It's hilarious watching Memphis news and Memphis city trying to mooch off that. The people that work there will shop and live in Tipton county, Fayette and Haywood.
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It’s a Jackson problem because it’s the only city in Mississippi. The other places are losing population because they were already too smal and sparsely populated to be attractive to new growth. Jackson has all the advantages, and is just 17ing it up because its voters refuse to consider anybody competent. Jackson should be getting a disproportionate share of growth in hinds county, and instead it is managing to shrink while the rest of the county grows.
This popped up earlier today and it seems pretty appropriate to this thread, just with a different state and politician:
It's all what you want in life. I've lived in Tennessee and Texas and decided to take less money to start with by coming home. I now make equal to what I would have made in those other states. I was recently in Idaho and the folks I worked with were lamenting home prices. They all live outside of Boise because they couldn't afford land/houses. One drives front 4t miles away, and lives in a 1400 sq ft house on a quarter acre of land: $350,000. Another lives in an older 1900 sq ft house at $570,000. I'm not interested in the party scene but if that's what younger folks want, go for it. I prefer wide open spaces and I can always visit the mountains, beaches, etc. I'm a few years away from retirement and have a 100 acre piece of family land in a sparcely populated County. That's what I call paradise. It's different for everyone. As far as economics, we are never going to truly change, no matter what party is in power. We are mainly an agricultural and service state. Automation has decreased the need for labor. We will always be able to pull a rabbit from our hat like Nissan in Canton, Continental in Clinton, Toyota in Blue Springs and Milwaukee in Grenada, but not to the extent that we will ever be home to major industries. What truly hurts us is a school system that doesn't produce enough high quality graduates due to lack of funding, resources and frankly parents/guardians who give a damn about their kids fortunes. Too many are invested in cheap, poorly educated labor. In the end, Mississippi is what she has always been: a place to call home, a place in our hearts, but not an exciting place where young people say, I want to live there.
Misappropriation of infrastructure funds in the 80's and early 90's, along with the introduction of NAFTA are the two major things that killed growth in Mississippi. 4 lane roads that were proposed, funded and started took 25 years or more to finish, some are still not finished after 44 years. The factories in rural areas wanted easier access, NAFTA just gave them more incentive to leave.
We have all seen in the last 20 years 2 great examples of misused funds. The Beef plant Musgrove pushed and the Kemper coal plant.
We have all seen in the last 20 years 2 great examples of misused funds. The Beef plant Musgrove pushed and the Kemper coal plant.
Cities suck. I grew up in NY. I visited last year and it was a hell hole. The house I grew up in just sold for a million dollars. It is not worth a million dollars in reality.
Pontotoc and or county also. Anyone who thinks New York City is a better place to live is nuts. Don’t argue.
To maintain and potentially grow the population in the State, part of Jackson is going to have to be cleaned up and developed for the under 35 crowd as mentioned previously. All the tax dollars being spent to educate MS students at State and the out of state students at Ole Miss are wasted when they move off to metro areas with more fun things to do. Jackson is not going to sway those moving to Austin and Nashville, but there’s plenty moving elsewhere who would’ve considered Jackson if it has a better entertainment scene and wasn’t so dangerous.
You apparently have a very narrow breadth of experience with the under 35 crowd. The under 35 crowd is like most generations. A small portion that are really go getters, a bigger but still smallish portion that are destructive and a net drain on society, with most inbetween. Only difference I'd feel confident in is that they have a lot more diagnosed or self diagnosed mental illnesses. Some of that is just doing a better job identifying people with actual mental illness, some of that is social media actually negatively impacting mental health, a lot of it is a combination of actually being worse off for being the first generation raised where disability or victimhood confers positive status plus some just status seeking. I suspect they might be less violent on average than prior generations but I haven't seen any data on that.
I heavily (par for the course at SPS natch) disagree with the bolded part of your post.
Having been undiagnosed as being on the spectrum for most of my life, my personal life has been MUCH better since I was diagnosed.
If you want to figure out how that translates into being a good place to live, you really need per capita income rather than per capita GDP and you need to adjust it for purchasing power parity.
Even with those numbers, you really need to look at the distribution. Places like California are a great place to be rich and a pretty good place to be poor. You don't want to try to make it as middle class or probably even lower upper class there. Places in Mississippi with decent public school options are pretty good places to be middle class and upper class unless you really want amenities that come with more densely populated areas.
I would think you fall under the first clause of that sentence then although I wasn’t talking about things like autism and learning disabilities. I don’t really consider those mental illness but not sure if they technically are.
Not a chance. It would take complete cultural transformation that usually takes a century or more. Mississippi is exactly how it want to be.
When undiagnosed folks (like myself back then) get a lot of grief from neurotypical folks, I’d consider that grief to be external stresses which may lead to mental issues…. (‘Why aren’t like I everyone else?’ can be a common refrain.)
Is Kentucky and MS really all that applies to?
it doesn’t apply to Chicago? New York City? What about the eldest California Senator who cannot feed herself much less provide representation? What about the states who lost more population by percent in 2022 than both Mississippi and Kentucky? New York, Illinois, Hawaii, Oregon? Do they not have entertainment for the under 35 segment?
Do we wanna be more like the states that gained the most? Florida? Texas? Montana? Idaho? South Dakota? Utah? Then why are people griping about the current state of the government?
We keep talking about what a dump Jackson is… but then we want to put more ideals and thinking in state government that Jackson currently has? “We need to do something about Jackson!” Hell, it’s being tried. And it’s being stonewalled. They can barely get an agreement on who picks up the garbage. And can barely feed the animals in the zoo. Meanwhile the place rots. But we need that fresh thinking and compromise in state government?
really?
This iron fisted government that has been alluded to has ushered in Medical Marijuana, craft beer laws, loosened the barriers to get resort status, brought in the lottery, vastly improved education from when give was iron fisted on the opposite direction for decades on end, ran fiber internet through most all of the state, and is trying to institute the same tax laws that are one of the huge draws to Texas and Florida.
it’s not government.. it’s investment in the “fun” things that needs to improve for the younger crowd.
Bay Springs Lake in North East MS is a prime example. Complete and absolute waste of a prime opportunity. The Natchez trace runs right past it with zero need for anyone to exit. Not because of government… because of investment. That could be a new Guntersville, AL. Same thing for other lakes and reservoirs. It’s not state government standing in the way. It’s investment (and sometime the fed govt with the corp of engineers).
But Bay Springs sits there without so much as a restaurant around it. Wasted wasted wasted opportunities.
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But Mississippi is struggling all throughout the state. I don’t doubt Jackson is a part of the state’s overall trend.
I listed earlier MS being basically last in workforce, infrastructure, etc. That’s not coming from the Jackson Mayor’s office.
This was my thought.
But to spin it as a positive, I think about a salary as it compares to the "living wage" in Mississippi. Obviously, the greater your income is compared to the living wage should theoretically correlate to how comfortable you are financially. $70k salary in MS vs $45k COL, you'd have a comfortable cushion. $150k salary in Mississippi vs the COL, you'd be extremely comfortable for your area.
Then I think about what if I moved to a state with roughly double the COL as Mississippi, say, Massachusetts. Approx. $90k COL. If my job demanded a $45k salary, I highly doubt the same job would demand $90k in Mass. The locality increase would be much more in-line with 1.5x that of the Mississippi salary I suppose. So that $45k I pulled in Mississippi would probably pull me maybe $75-80k in Mass. for the same job. You'd be sitting behind the curve in Mass. when you where right at it in Miss.
My reasoning may be way off, but that's how I look at this.
That 50th in business friendliness is surprising. Our gov't will cut any deal they can and issue monumental tax breaks just to recruit businesses here. Now that I think about it, it's probably why most of the major economic development going on recently is even here.
My point is that the other places in Mississippi are struggling in the same way that most rural, sparsely populated areas across the country are struggling. Officials in Warren County or Vicksburg can be smarter and try not to hurt the county/city, but at the end of the day, not much of what they can do is going to drive growth. The best they can do is create favorable conditions and hope they get lucky with a homegrown business exploding.
In contrast, Jackson should be booming if for no other reason than it should be capturing a decent amount of instate migration away from more rural areas. All Jackson has to do is provided the basics:
- adequate water and sewer services
- reasonably safe environment where criminals are arrested, held unless appropriate bond is posted, tried in a timely manner, and subject to reasonable consequences if convicted
- provide decent public schools or vouchers
All of that is easily attainable and the state would almost certainly provide the resources required to do that if Jackson government didn't fight against it.
Big sell. The whole state isn't Jackson and the Delta.
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The Federal government owns almost all of the land with water frontage at Bay Springs.
Why not? It’s about the most objective economic indicator there is when comparing areas / demographics that can be very dissimilar. Not saying its the only indicator, but its certainly one of the main ones to look at….especially when trying to judge if a state or region has good economic policy at the state level.
And if you don’t measure success by per capita GDP and don’t measure success by required living wage, how would you measure it?
Me: Hey, here's this marginally funny and marginally relevant image I saw on Twitter.
You:
Lighten up, Francis. Here's one about Dianne Feinstein to ease your suffering.
I was raised in a small Mississippi town and educated in it's public schools. Both my wife and I have degrees from State. We got married and chose to live and raise our family in the town we were raised. We worked hard and had to make ends meet for a few years but we got on our feet and eventually attained a good quality of life. Is this no longer possible in Mississippi ?
as a postscript to this Thad Cochran was totally unfit (health wise) when got elected the last time thus we eventually ended with Mini Pearl as our senatorMe: Hey, here's this marginally funny and marginally relevant image I saw on Twitter.
You:
Lighten up, Francis. Here's one about Dianne Feinstein to ease your suffering.
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True. But remember back in 2007 or so.. a resort area was granted to some investment company to build a resort with a golf course, hotel, restaurants, etc. The recession bombed it.
There can be development there if the right effort is made. Same with other places. But it’s already been proven that it is not fuddy duddy state reps that would be a barrier to it.
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