Dec. 7, 2011
GOV. BARBOUR SPEAKS ON 'VALUES THAT MADE AMERICA GREAT'
TUPELO – Gov. Haley Barbour today called for a return to foundational American values and a strong work ethic to tackle Mississippi’s social issues, including illegitimacy and dropouts. The state has made steady progress bringing up salaries luring high-skilled jobs, however more can be done, he told an audience of Tupelo business leaders and community members.
"If we had more intact families led by two parents; if we had fewer children born to teenage girls; if parents required their children to take advantage of the education we offer them, and, in fact, supported their kids' and their schools; and if everyone who can work, did work or at least tried to get a job; I assure you every problem and shortcoming we have as a state will get better … far better," Gov. Barbour said.
The speech was the first of a three-part series on how to Keep Mississippi Moving.
He will discuss ways to improve education at 12:30 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 8, at the Governor’s Workforce Conference in Jackson. The event is at the Jackson Convention Complex, 105 E. Pascagoula Street.
Gov. Barbour will talk about budget responsibility at 1 p.m. Dec. 15 at the Mississippi Coast Coliseum and Convention Center, 2350 Beach Boulevard, in Biloxi.
Text of the speech:
Values That Made America Great
Wednesday, December 7, 2011
Tupelo, Mississippi
Because I’m leaving office in about a month, it is appropriate for me to focus on some of the issues that haven’t been resolved over the last eight years…problems which will confront Governor-elect Bryant, the new Legislature and the people of Mississippi. I won’t try to cover every subject today as I’ll speak again tomorrow in Jackson and next week on the Coast.
Some of these problems are of long standing, having plagued our state for decades. Some of those are getting worse, not only in Mississippi, but nationwide.
On the other hand there are some serious new problems that we must address, and, whether we realize it or not, some problems we haven’t even recognized yet.
Don’t get me wrong. My point is not that Mississippi hasn’t made progress these last eight years; we have. It’s a better place to live; our people earn more money; state government is in better financial shape. There is progress to brag about, but sometimes you need to put the spotlight on shortcomings and try to get your arms around solutions … or at least get headed in the right direction.
And Tupelo is the appropriate place for this conversation to occur.
This area was the least blessed part of Mississippi in terms of natural resources. Northeast Mississippi is the foothills of Appalachia, and doesn’t have the abundant, fertile cropland of the Delta or the Prairie. Large scale agriculture never took root here, for there is little land that lends itself to profitable row crop farming on even an economic scale.
The oil and natural gas plays of the last seventy years happened in other parts of Mississippi, and the terrain for the timber industry, while not awful, is not nearly as well suited to plantation pine production as millions of acres further to the south in the Piney Woods.
The region didn’t have the Mississippi River as a transportation artery or the scenic Gulf Coast with its potential for ports.
So Northeast Mississippi, led by the Tupelo business leadership, built an economic base around its human capital. As one of my old partners used to say, “No options, no problems.” When you have no choice, you do what you have to do!
Toyota today is the natural result of decisions those leaders made decades ago to bring low skill, low wage manufacturing jobs to Northeast Mississippi and to train this workforce of manufacturing workers.
I mention this because it illustrates that strong leadership can address problem situations and solve them, achieving a desired positive result over a period of time, even though that could be decades.
Let’s face it; we’ve got some problems that won’t get solved by this next administration or even the next two or three.
A clear example is our health situation. Mississippians have high incidences of diabetes, cardio-vascular disease and obesity … often the worst in the country.
Our health disparities are primarily related to poor eating habits and lack of exercise, as well as such behavior as smoking, drug abuse and excess alcohol consumption. Other major factors are low-weight babies and high rates of illegitimacy.
We’ve subjected ourselves to a bad diet for a long, long time. I grew up thinking that anything worth eating was better fried. And usually fried in lard. Mama thought Crisco was a Commie plot.
Fat, sugar, salt and alcohol. I thought those were the basic four New Orleans food groups!
But these kinds of bad eating habits coupled with a decided lack of exercise ultimately lead to bad outcomes. When I played high school football, and then spent twenty-seven innings a week behind the plate in baseball catching in hundred degree weather, I could eat like a horse and still be thirty-three in the waist.
But far too many of our children get next to no exercise. And most of our adults, including our Governor, get way too little.
Still, we’ve at least begun to try to tackle the problem.
Blue Cross Blue Shield Mississippi, our largest private insurer, has pushed for more exercise through its Let’s Go Walking, Mississippi program, with Marsha as its spokeswoman.
The program has been aggressively promoted in our schools, with green sprouts of successful results showing in several areas. Businesses have created incentives and urged employees to improve their health, both lowering insurance costs and increasing productivity in the workforce.
Church groups have taken up the Let’s Go Walking banner, and a number of groups, churches and others, have worked hard to teach citizens how to purchase and prepare healthier food for their families.
Government has joined the battle. State employees get financial incentives for healthier lifestyles, such as smoking cessation, losing weight, etc. Like other employers the State is encouraging exercise and preventative medicine.
The Legislature passed Healthy Education bills, and today physical education is again required daily for all school children from kindergarten through the eighth grade. Those same kids receive at least one forty-five minute class on health every week. We’ve improved our standards for meals students eat at school and banned sugary snacks from school vending machines.
Mississippi won’t be the most-fit state in 2020, but we should begin to see progress before then. We’ll be on our way to a significant improvement in health outcomes and quality of life for most Mississippians. The current march toward a society with huge numbers of teen-aged and twenty-something Type 2 adult-onset diabetes patients should be stopped and reversed in this generation.
But change of this magnitude in areas like diet, exercise and healthier lifestyles don’t happen overnight. And they are very hard, especially if we don’t get control of the scourge of illegal drug use, which is ruining hundreds of thousands of lives. Similarly, alcohol abuse is a major spoiler of lives and driver of health care costs.
Personal conduct and individual responsibility are the keys to diet and exercise, to stopping smoking and to getting and staying clean and sober.
Today a large portion of our state Medicaid budget is spent on behavioral problems, often drug and alcohol related.
Just as we have to teach healthy lifestyles to our school kids to achieve a healthier Mississippi, we must learn to successfully battle drug and alcohol abuse through a combination of law enforcement and effective treatment. Even more important, we have to start fighting and winning these battles in homes, with the parents and families of Mississippi in the forefront.
As will be the case with the other two subjects about which I’ll speak today, a return to traditional American values is the single-most important thing we can do to improve health outcomes in this state and country.
A government-run health care system is not the answer; indeed, it is a step in the wrong direction.
The left, starting with the President through ObamaCare, wants to make private health care more like government health care, with all its costs and bureaucratic controls. Instead, we need to make government health care more like private health care, with decisions made by doctors and patients.
And in the center should be the family, acting on the values that made America exceptional.
Our low ranking health care outcomes and disparities are already well known to us, and we’ve begun to take action, but I believe our efforts will be far more effective sooner if they’re family-centered.
Another critical factor in negative health statistics is our high rate of illegitimacy. Our state ranks near the worst for children born to teen-aged girls and the data is emphatically clear that children born out of wedlock, with no father at home helping raise them, suffer dramatically higher levels of poverty, drug addition, incarceration, premature death. They have lower birth weights, worse infant mortality rates and smaller chances of finishing high school.
The Women’s Fund of Mississippi, an advocacy group for women’s issues, has called for a major reduction in the number of babies born to teen-aged mothers. And, yesterday, the Daily Journal editorialized on the need to reduce illegitimacy.
To deal with our health issues, but also our education and economic issues, cutting our illegitimacy rate in half in five years should be at the top of the list.
But how? I suggest the start is family; rebuilding the family with strong support from the church. Government has a key role to play but the answers, the plan and the programs need to be developed by churches and families.
The problems associated with my two subjects besides health outcomes also are largely related to our drifting away from traditional American values as well.
The two issues are very strongly related, as you will see, but I think it behooves us to discuss them sequentially.
The solutions in my opinion are anything but easy yet I believe the family and the church, whence came our values, philosophy and form of government, both throughout our history and in our foundational documents, such as the Declaration of Independence and Constitution; are up to helping government and its institutions get us on the right track for maximum economic, educational and cultural attainment in Mississippi.
Education is the number one economic issue in our state, and every other state; and it’s the number one quality of life issue, too.
We’ve not immune to the national and international economy, but we have made progress in the last years, economically.
The Frazer Institute in Canada says Mississippi is the best jurisdiction in the world to do energy projects, and billions of dollars of energy investments have been made here since 2003. Great existing industries like Chevron’s Refinery; Entergy’s Grand Gulf facility, and Mississippi Power, with its under-construction $1.4 billion Kemper County lignite-fired plant, have made capital investments above $4 billion; Gulf LNG, Denbury and a variety of pipeline companies have invested another $2 billion in our oil and gas infrastructure; and we’ve become a favorite for alternative energy companies like Kior’s wood to motor fuel facilities, Twin Creeks and Stion’s solar panel plants; Calisolar’s polysilicon mill, to Solardigm’s dynamic window plant and companies manufacturing for the energy industry like Schulz in Tunica.
Last month Area Development, a site selection magazine, said Mississippi ranks ninth among all states as the best to locate businesses, and in the top five in several categories. Obviously, companies like Toyota, GE Aviation, Caterpillar, Cooper Tire, Severstal, American Eurocopter and Winchester have got site selectors attention.
Importantly, we’ve had real success in the last several years in meeting our goal of replacing low-skill, low-paying jobs with higher-skilled, higher-paying jobs.
The best evidence: In 2010 per capita income had risen thirty percent from 2003 levels, even though there are fewer people working than at the peak. We won’t know the 2011 figures until next year, but with the opening of Toyota and its suppliers and several other big manufacturers, I’m confident per capita income will again rise in ’11.
Having relayed all that recent good news about Mississippi’s economic circumstances, I have to tell you there are clouds on the horizon that must be addressed sooner rather than later. And success in education will be a major part of the answer.
We have too much failure in our education system today, most especially in K-12 schools. Very little of it relates to insufficient funding, though I’d like to see us spend more, and spend better. I don’t blame our teachers for these failures, though some teachers aren’t up to the task, and we don’t utilize available technology nearly enough.
Our schools need better leadership. You can really see the difference where there is a great principal; but top principals can’t always help solve the problem about which I’m most concerned.
My concern is the drop-out rate ... the enormous number of students who quit school before high school graduation, much less higher education. The numbers have improved but not nearly enough.
It is wrong to blame the taxpayer for this failure. Mississippi public schools spend about $9,000 per K-12 student, yet tens of thousands of children drop out.
Principals and teachers rarely are the main reasons for kids’ dropping out.
When Mississippi’s K-12 schools spend more than $4.5 billion to teach almost 470,000 children, it is not the taxpayer or the government that’s the failure. The failure is at home. The responsibility rests at home with the parents.
Tomorrow in Jackson, I’ll propose a path to a solution for the drop-out horror. You can be assured it will revolve around values. Some of the same key goals to improving health outcomes – such as a fifty percent reduction in the teen birth rate - are also critical to reinculcating families with the values that underline America’s greatness. Family support and involvement are essential to addressing our educational failures.
Do not underestimate or simply miss the tie between economic growth and job creation, on the one hand, and educational achievement on the other.
Everyday technological innovation and globalization make high skill levels and advanced learning more and more indispensible to holding a job and enjoying a career.
Let me share a quick story.
Some months ago I heard Tom Friedman, the New York Times Foreign Affairs Columnist, make a speech about his new book, That Used to Be Us.
As usual, Friedman was brilliant, provocative and alarming in his assessment of the information technology revolution and of globalization; not only on the world and U.S. economies but on individual Americans.
At one point he cited an innovation technology entrepreneur as saying, “Productivity increases kill jobs.” Since innovation and technology are the main drivers of productivity gains in America, and those productivity increases are necessary to keep U.S. businesses competitive in the global economy, Friedman’s well-thought out analysis was deeply concerning, as it is all to plausible.
Subsequently, he alluded to but did not name the “sustaining values” which underpinned our country’s rise to become the wealthiest, most powerful, most admired country in the history of the world.
I’ve always called these “sustaining values” by the name “traditional American values.” They are values that begin with strong families, freedom of religion, the rule of law, private property and the opportunity to succeed in the market economy. Individual freedom bound to personal responsibility.
All were and are essential to American Exceptionalism, but I’m referring to one other key attribute here: It is the value of “work” … “the Protestant work ethic,” as it was called before political correctness.
I fear families … or more accurately, many mothers don’t send their children to school and make sure they graduate because those parents don’t expect their children to have to work to feed themselves and their families in the future.
They expect the state to take care of them, as, unfortunately, the welfare state has allowed many of those mothers to get by without working at a job.
How else can you explain why a parent will let a child quit school at a time when it’s so abundantly clear that any job, much less a good career, requires nothing so much as education and skills? I can find no other answer.
Niall Ferguson, in Civilization: The West and the Rest, his outstanding chronicle of why the United States and Western Europe have so far surpassed the rest of the world over the last five hundred years, cites the “work ethic” that was engrained into everyone from protestant North America and Western Europe in the period from the Reformation until the rise of the Welfare State in the U.S. fifty years ago.
People came here to work, excited about the opportunity to work and better themselves. The chance to work brought them to America, and made them and their descendants Americans.
Regrettably, last month only sixty-four percent of adult Americans were either working or seeking a job. This is the lowest percentage since before women entered the workforce in large numbers decades ago. In Mississippi, even fewer -60%- are working or seeking a job.
Couple that low number with the fact that nationally forty-seven percent of families paid no federal income tax last year.
Not long ago America’s “Sustaining Values” would certainly have included working hard and paying your taxes.
To get our kids at least a high school diploma, which is free; ready for a job, and hopefully, a career; parents must remember and again embrace the “work ethic” handed down to us by our forefathers and then instill it in those children and grandchildren.
No matter how many billions you spend on schools, children must attend to learn, and their parents must not only require them to attend, but stand at the forefront of our educational efforts for us to have any chance of success.
The urgency of this problem becomes even clearer when you recognize the third issue on my agenda today.
If education is critical for today’s worker, it is becoming more and more critical, at a faster and faster pace.
“Productivity increases” do kill jobs, just as Friedman said. And those increases are happening at an ever faster rate.
Our current problem of too many dropouts is harmful today to those individuals who dropped out. It is very difficult for them to find work. It affects some areas of our state more adversely, because those areas have too few skilled or trainable workers to attain the critical mass needed to attract high paying employers. Fortunately, we still have some slack in most places, and people can move or commute to the areas able to attract good jobs.
But the speed of change in the workplace and the requirement for increasingly higher skilled workers soon will make this problem critical, if we don’t get on top of it quickly. Innovation and technology drive productivity increases; they will not wait for us. We need a sense of urgency; especially families need a sense of urgency, to give their children a fighting chance. But I beg you to realize: if too few young people finish school and acquire work skills, not only will those people fail; the community won’t be able to attract good jobs. The progress of three generations would be reversed, then lost.
Our state has made a lot of progress . . . on many fronts, but, we still have a lot more to do.
To keep moving forward together, a reaffirmation of traditional American values can only help.
If we had more intact families, led by two parents; if we had fewer children born to teenage girls; if parents required their children to take advantage of the education we offer them, and, in fact, supported their kids’ and their schools; and if everyone who can work, did work or at least tried to get a job; I assure you every problem and shortcoming we have as a state would get better … far better.
So, here’s to the values on which our country was based and which helped us flourish. May we always embrace them and instill them in our children and grandchildren, so our state and nation will be sustained.
Thank you.
Governor Barbour