Mississippi is a charitable state. Or is it?
Every year, reports are made rating states on their generosity, but how a state ranks often relies on what data is used to make those calculations. For example, if charity is ranked by the volunteer rate of the population, the average number of volunteer hours performed and the percentage of people who are directly involved in distributing food and money to the poor, Mississippi ranks 48th.
Yet if charity is based on tax return information (donations to tax-deductible contributions), our state ranks 10th. When ranked by the percentage of discretionary income that goes to charitable causes, Mississippi soars to No. 2 on the list.
Yet, even if you could collect data that includes every measurable aspect of charitable giving and generate rankings on that basis, there can be no truly objective measurement.
Why? Because the every-day charity that doesn’t show up on an income tax return or some sort of official report cannot be measured. It does not and cannot include the every-day acts of generosity – neighbor helping neighbor, friend helping friend, a few bucks to a ragged stranger on the street corner – that ultimately is the purest form of charity. As the old Swedish proverb goes, “True charity sees the need, not the cause.”
As a people, Americans made the decision long ago that we, as a society, are indeed our brother’s keeper, harnessing from the collective wealth or our nation to provide safety nets for our poorest citizens. Each year, federal funds collected from across the nation are distributed based on the needs of the state. Mississippi, being one of the poorest states, receives a large amount of that funding.
Of those federal funds coming to our state, $86.5 million annually is designated for a program called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). The average Mississipian had probably never heard of TANF until a couple of years ago, when a massive amount of those funds were misdirected, often directly into the pockets of politically well-connected friends in high places in our state government. The State Auditor’s office estimated the amount of those misappropriated funds at $77 million, making it the largest public corruption scandal in Mississippi history.
Yet in truth, the state’s handling of TANF money has been shameful long before this scandal emerged. It is a scandal that persists and will likely continue to persist.
The state spends less than half of its TANF money ($86.5 million) to provide direct cash assistance to the poor or for programs that help them, as reported by Mississippi Today’s Anna Wolfe. Just $4 million (4.7 percent) goes directly in the pockets of poor Mississippians. Another $35 million goes to provide programs like daycare and workforce training. That portion accounts for 40 percent of the funding.
That means 51 percent of the funds to help poor Mississippians go to a long list of vendors involved in everything from banks to software companies to marketing companies to attorneys or isn’t used at all.
Would you give to any charity that spends less than half of its resources on the cause it was created to address? Obviously not.
As for the scandal itself, the first arrests were made in February 2020, while the legislature was still in session. Now we are in the third full session since the scandal was exposed.
Care to guess how many hearings the legislature has held on this matter? Zero.
As Homer Simpson once observed, “Just because I don’t care doesn’t mean I don’t understand.”
Charity is, first and foremost, a function of the heart.
When we see funds that should be devoted to the poorest among us being so badly, so unscrupulously managed, our hearts should cry out for change.
We shouldn’t merely ask our legislators to correct this abuse. We should demand it.
The extent to which we demand that from our legislators is a reflection of just how charitable we really are.
The Dispatch Editorial Board is made up of publisher Peter Imes, columnist Slim Smith, managing editor Zack Plair and senior newsroom staff.
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