Mississippi has long been the poorest state in the United States, with real gross domestic product per person just 60% of the national average. However, the United States is a rich country, so Mississippi is not too bad by international standards. Specifically, it is more or less on a par with the countries of southern Europe: a little poorer than Spain and a little richer than Portugal.
You also have to keep in mind that Mississippi is part of the United States and receives enormous de facto help from the richest states: it benefits greatly from federal programs such as Medicare and Social Security, while, being its income low, it pays relatively few federal taxes. Calculations by the Rockefeller Institute indicate that in 2019 the southern state received net federal transfers of almost 24 billion dollars, around 20% of its GDP and much more than the aid received, for example, by Portugal from the European Union.
However, the citizens of Portugal or Spain have things that not all Mississippians have, like universal health careand running water. On Monday, the water supply to Jackson, the state’s capital and largest city, collapsed. A large part of the urban core does not have a drop of running water, there is no drinking water available at any point and it is not clear when the service will be restored.
The immediate cause of the crisis has been torrential rains that overwhelmed the city’s largest water treatment plant. But the weather event, while severe, did not represent a Katrina-level shock. It was a disaster only because the city’s water supply system had already begun to fail as a result of years of neglect.
On the other hand, this negligence was basically a political decision. Despite having a relatively low income relative to what is normal in the United States, Mississippi as a whole surely has the resources to provide clean water to all its inhabitants. Yet Jackson, a largely black core whose economy has been bled dry by white flight, lacks them. And the state refused to help, even as the looming water crisis became increasingly predictable.
But fear not: Last April, Republican Governor Tate Reeves announced that he was making “an investment in the citizens of Mississippi.” By “investment” he meant a tax cut rather than spending, for example, on education or infrastructure. Political scientist Brendan Nyhan likes to point to examples of democratic deterioration and ask, “What would you say if you saw it in another country?” Well, what about a place that doesn’t even guarantee that its capital has a reliable water supply?
To put all this in perspective, you have to know two trends: one economic and the other political. On the economy: As I’ve already said, Mississippi has long been the poorest state in the United States. In fact, at the beginning of the 20th century, the Deep South was actually a developing country embedded in the most advanced economy in the world. However, in the decades after World War II, this and other southern states achieved rapid increases in revenues that narrowed, but did not close, the gap with the rest of the federation.
Then relative progress stalled. Sure enough, Mississippi began to lag behind again; For example, between 1980 and 2015, life expectancy in the United States as a whole increased by about seven years, while in Mississippi it was only three. We have a pretty good idea of what happened after 1980. Most likely, as the United States became more and more of a knowledge-based economy, high-value economic activities—and skilled workers—were they moved to metropolitan areas attracted by good services and highly educated workforce. Places like Mississippi, which in 1980 had relatively few highly educated workers and fell further behind over time, were the losers from the change.
There are no easy solutions to the problem of backward regions, but one thing is certain: imagining that tax cuts will bring prosperity to a State with low educational levels that cannot even supply drinking water to its capital is pure illusion.
Which brings us to the political trends behind these chimeras. Since Ronald Reagan, the Republican Party has been dominated by anti-government ideology. In the famous phrase of anti-tax activist Grover Norquist, the goal was to shrink the state to the point of “drowning it in the bathtub.” When Donald Trump ran for president, it seemed for a moment that his party was going to break with that ideology, embrace the social safety net, and focus on ethnic and racial hostility.
But not. Instead, Republicans, believing they can win elections by stirring up their base on social issues like attacks on racial and social justice movements, have doubled down on right-wing economics. Congressional candidates are once again talking about repealing Obamacare and privatizing Social Security. And Republican-led states have not just cut social programs, they have killed public services that Americans have taken for granted for generations, like public educationand clean water. Will this provoke a political backlash? I have no idea, but I wonder: can the State be drowned in a bathtub that cannot even be filled?
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Source: EL PAIS
