EDITORIAL: Dynamic blueprint

Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal

Mississippi's leading business executives, the governor and the state's most influential development organization put their reputations and influence on the line Monday in unveiling a long-term economic plan that admits getting things together first among ourselves is necessary before making progress against outside competition.

MEC President Blake Wilson called it a basis for dialogue.

It must be at least that among the movers and shakers in the mix of civic leaders, financiers, and political trend setters to keep the obviously robust ideas alive.

The 10 main goals all reflect at least the core of actions measurable in the success of Southern states ahead of Mississippi in their economic growth and general quality of life attainments. The citations aren't criticism; they are hurdles to measure progress and, someday, to be cleared.

Blueprint Mississippi is the brainchild of the Mississippi Economic Council, a non-partisan super-chamber of commerce which does its best work in building coalitions of leadership to tackle our biggest challenges.

Its plans laid in the blueprint are realistic and achievable if enough brains are set to the task and enough shoulders put to the wheel.

For example, in early childhood, pre-kindergarten education, the goal is to have 60 percent of the eligible children in Mississippi enrolled by 2015. That doesn't seem far-fetched, especially in light of the 55 percent enrollment this year, which includes both privately and publicly funded pre-k schooling. The catch is that Mississippi spends no state tax money on pre-K education.

Kindergartens are funded with state tax dollars, but pre-kindergarten education is either locally funded or privately financed.

The rest of the South is running away from us, even though effective pre-kindergarten schooling is shown to give children a wonderful head-up in reading and a lifelong incentive to stay in school longer with all the advantages going with that decision.

The Blueprint research also found two areas of great opportunity in demographic information: Growth of a 25-34-year-old, well-educated work force looking for economic opportunity, and even more dramatic growth of the 65-plus population (53 percent) in the next 10 years with a significant opportunity for second careers and increased economic activity associated with retirement income.

The full report is a mine of information waiting for excavation and refining by analysts and entrepreneurs.

Its data may also require a re-evaluation of the direction government plans to take in terms of economic policy, its own growth, spending, and restructuring.

It would be tragic to allow any kind of ideology to wreck obvious opportunity as it develops in Mississippi during what appears to be an unprecedented decade of new growth on the horizon.

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Appeared originally in the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, 8/11/2004 8:00:00 AM, section B , page 5