Mississippi is always near the bottom in income and quality of education. It looks as though the Democratic House and the Republican Senate are once again at loggerheads, this time over money for schools, and won't be able to agree on a budget before the legislature meets in January.

The state is faced with a double-bind: Without a better-educated populace, things are not going to get better for most Mississippians, but without ways to put that education into use, either as employees or entrepreneurs, our best and brightest will go elsewhere to find opportunity. Conversely, students without prospects of earning a decent living have no incentive to take advantage of educational opportunities. If getting a high school diploma in Mississippi led to a livable income, people would get a high school education. The same goes with higher education. In economic terms, if the opportunity cost of not going to school is very low, people will be much less inclined to take advantage of school.

Look at it this way: if suddenly every adult Mississippian acquired a PhD, would the state become prosperous? Hardly.

The problem is that the economy of this state is structurally incapable of generating general prosperity. Mississippi's ruling class has always assumed, either consciously or unconsciously, that the hope of the state lies in low wages, weak unions, tourism, agriculture, and natural resources. How a highly-educated citizenry fits in with that vision has not been addressed, since that kind of economy can easily function with a small, well-paid elite and a minimum-wage workforce.

Admittedly, this is a vast oversimplification of the problem, but unless we start addressing it, we will never receive the benefit from the billions we spend on education, both from our tax money and the money transferred to us from the more prosperous states by the federal government. We will never achieve prosperity by electing to Congress men who have brought us massive tax cuts for the wealthy and powerful, NAFTA, GATT, the WTO, the Bankruptcy "Reform" bill, and who have invariably opposed over their entire political careers every proposal to increase the minimum wage or any other measure to help the non-affluent.:

There was a time when the following poem was meaningless to me. Now it speaks as if it were written today:

Consider these, for we have condemned them;
Leaders to no sure land, guides their bearings lost
Or in league with robbers have reversed the signposts,
Disrespectful to ancestors, irresponsible to heirs,
Born barren , a freak growth, root in rubble,
Fruitlessly blossoming, whose foliage suffocates,
Their sap is sluggish, they reject the sun.

The man with his tongue in his cheek, the woman
With her heart in the wrong place, unhandsome, unwholesome;
Have exposed the new-born to worse than weather,
Exiled the honest and sacked the seer.
These drowned the farms to form a pleasure-lake,
In time of drought they drain the reservoir
Through private pipes for baths and sprinklers.

Getters not begetters; gainers not beginners;
Whiners, no winners; no triers, betrayers;
Who steer by no star, whose moon means nothing.
Daily denying, unable to dig:
At bay in villas from blood relations,
Counters of spoons and content with cushions
They pray for peace, they hand down disaster.

They that take the bribe shall perish by the bribe,
Dying of dry rot, ending in asylums,
A curse to children, a charge on the state.
But still their fears and frenzies infect us;
Drug nor isolation will cure this cancer;
It is now or never, the hour of the knife,
The break with the past, the major operation.

--C. Day Lewis (1904-1972)