If you had $150,000 to spend on a house, where would you live in MS? (Jackson: best cities, rent)

[Tipacanoe]

I would look at Gulf Shores Alabama / Foley Al. It is a great place and for $150,000 you can easily get in a golf course community in an almost new house. Great foreclosure prices!!

[Tipacanoe]

Amen

[Alluvial]

I would buy land around French Camp and build a small house on it. It's so beautiful there.

[poptones]

according to dhhs, about 20 percent of the state lives below the poverty threshold of ~13.8K. Thirty percent of the children live below that line, which means thirty percent of them get some form of aid.

At the public school my nieces and nephews attend they do not know ANYONE who is not getting free breakfast and lunch. Any kid who gets state health insurance or is from a family that gets a check is automatically enrolled in the school lunch program.

Pointing to isolated areas like Madison as an example of how economically "great" things are in Mississippi is as silly as pointing to rural areas like the one my brother lives in as an example of how well the pervasiveness of guns keeps a lid on crime. From what I can see on the local news there are plenty of guns in Greenville and Greenwood and I wouldn't wish my worse enemy have to live in either place.

I love where I live and I hate that MS gets a bad rap from time to time, but pretending the problems aren't real is never going to help improve the state's reputation.

[Gill O'Blarney]

26% of 3,000,000 = 780,000 total number of children in MS
30% of 780,000 = 234,000 children in MS below the poverty income level
234,000 divided by 3,000,000 = 7.8% of Mississippians are children who live below the poverty income level.

By way of comparison with the 30% figure for MS. California has 18.9 % of its children living below the poverty level. Louisiana has 30%. New Mexico has 27.7%. The numbers are bad, not just for Mississippi but for a large number of states. Mississippi is far from alone in having this problem.

It's undeniable that Mississippi is the poorest state in the nation when computed on a per capita basis statewide. Rural Mississippi is particularly bad off. My sister teaches at one such very poor rural school in Yazoo County, where the level of poverty is unbelievable. - And as you said, ignoring the problem won't make it go away. - But it's just as important not to wildly exaggerate the problem either.

By the way, the free school lunch program is open to any child from a family that has 180% of poverty level income. - School lunch subsidies have been around since Harry Truman. The amount of the subsidy now varies according to the child's household income, but every school lunch is subsidized to some extent, so you could say every schoolchild in America gets direct Federal assistance for school lunches.

[Gill O'Blarney]

Clarification:

"--------------Children from families with incomes at or below 130 percent of the poverty level are eligible for free meals. Those with incomes between 130 percent and 185 percent of the poverty level are eligible for reduced-price meals, for which students can be charged no more than 40 cents."

http://www.healthyschoolsms.org/nutr...es/faqnslp.htm

[poptones]

You make a lot of assumptions there. The stats don't sy 30% of children, it says 30% of people. The way you've divided things up assumes both an equal distribution of children per economic strata and an equal distribution of children per household. The stats I quoted were not divided up like this - it was per household. 30 percent of households...

[betwixt & between]

I cant verify this but I read that US Gov stats reflect 1 of 5 persons in the state of Mississippi are receiving Social Supplemental Income (SSI) on through the 3rd generation. SSI is avaialble thru Title XVI of the Social Security Act as an expansion of benefits and part of LBJ's Great Society since 1964 or 65. SSI is for people who haven't worked, and then say they can't work because of some kind of physical or mental disability. It's commonly known as Federal Welfare and is very easy to get. However, you slice it that's a depressing statistic even if it's only 5% of the population.

[brickpatio]

This graph shows Mississippi's per capita income since 1950, a six-fold increase through 2009. Mississippi is about the same as Britain, France, and Australia. Hi-tech companies such as Nissan, Toyota, Rolls Royce, Eurocopter, and the Russian steel company Severstall have chosen Mississippi in just the last few years, which says something about the availability of skilled workers and Mississippi's future. The pace of growth has occurred across demographic groups, which means eventually those on the bottom will steadily move into the Middle class.

Home > Economic Data - FRED® > Sources > Source: U.S. Department of Commerce: Bureau of Economic Analysis > Release: State Personal Income (Quarterly) > Series: MSOI96, Real Per Capita Personal Income in Mississippi
Series: MSOI96, Real Per Capita Personal Income in Mississippi

View Data | Download Data | Notify Me of Updates | Add to My Data List | Vintage Series in ALFRED | Map in GeoFRED
Type: Line | Bar | Pie | Scatter Units: Levels | Chg. | Chg. from Yr. Ago | % Chg. | % Chg. from Yr. Ago | Comp. Annual Rate of Chg. | Cont. Comp. Rate of Chg. | Cont. Comp. Annual Rate of Chg. | Log Range: 5yrs 10yrs MaxRecession Bars: On | OffSize: Medium | Large | X-Large Customize with FRED Graph | Description of US recession dates in graph
Latest Observations:
Date 2008:Q1 2008:Q2 2008:Q3 2008:Q4 2009:Q1 Value 24162.1 24835.4 23998.7 24227.0 24310.0

[poptones]

OK, so let's compare that to another state folks typically think of as (ahem) "underperforming." Here's the same map for Kentucky



Yikes! It's the same for most any other state you'd care to look at - MO, TN, etc. We haven't even kept up with Arkansas!

Look at the section on earnings in technical fields - not good at all.

Has the Toyota plant opened? It doesn't matter if Toyota "chose" us for a plant - if the plant never opens we still get no jobs and no earnings. What about Rolls? They're using existing infrastructure at the Stennis facility because they can no longer do the tests they're performing in the UK due to "environmental unsustainability!" Given that there are few facilities anywhere in the world to do these engine tests they do at Stennis it's not like there was loads of competition.. maybe Tennessee, Alabama, and here. Nissan did decided to go ahead witht he plant expansion in Canton, but look what they're building now - the line has shifted from making luxury vehicles to work trucks.

My point is not to rip on my home, but I do think optimism can be misplaced. We have a long way to go on education in this state before we're going to see real, significant change.

And again, an interesting discussion has gone off topic and so I'm sure all we've said, no matter how valid the points or how much merit the discussion, will soon be simply deleted - whisked off to the corn field never to be seen again...