The “economy” is one of those things that everybody knows, but nobody can describe. As a result, every economic discussion or debate often becomes just a litany of facts, figures, and datapoints.
But “the economy” isn’t numbers. It’s people.
People, and their families, make up the economy. The prosperous, the struggling, young people starting out, retirees entering their golden years; the economy reflects how these lives are prospering or struggling.
And it’s these lives that SPN and its partners around the country are fighting to improve. Our network understands that a state’s tax policy, business climate, affordability, population, and overall competitiveness isn’t about improving a balance sheet or bond rating. It’s about improving individuals lives. And thanks to numerous victories around the country, millions of lives are improving.
Making work tax-free in Mississippi
It should come as no surprise that states with the highest growth rates are also typically states with the lowest—or no taxes.
This was the dynamic that was hurting Mississippi. Despite many growth-friendly economic policies, Mississippi struggled to keep pace with its low or no-income tax neighbors such as Florida, Tennessee, and Texas. For years, these states consistently outperformed Mississippi in job creation, business investments, and population growth.
So, Mississippi’s two SPN partners, Empower Mississippi and the Mississippi Center for Public Policy (MCPP) launched a years-long campaign to reduce and eventually eliminate Mississippi’s income tax.
MCPP wrote numerous commentary pieces and research reports about the real need to cut the state’s income tax and let Mississippi families keep more of their hard-earned money. Their reports, Axe the Tax: The case for abolishing the state income tax in Mississippi and Eliminating the State Income Tax,provided the data and context legislators needed to push through income tax reforms.
Empower Mississippi’s team released the reports: Better Jobs Mississippi: Tax Structure for Growth and Moving the Needle: Select Recommendations for Improving Mississippi’s Labor Force Participation Rate. In their reports, Empower’s tax and budget experts showed how reforming the state’s tax and spending policies would improve Mississippi’s competitiveness.
In addition to clear and reliable research, Empower and MPCC worked closely with legislators and launched media and marketing campaigns to show Mississippians how income tax reform could be achieved.
The campaigns worked.
After more than 5 years of work, Mississippi lawmakers passed a bill that will reduce and eventually phase out the state’s income tax completely.
This victory was one of the most substantial in the nation over the last year. Because of that, both Empower Mississippi and the Mississippi Center for Public Policy were the winners of the 2025 SPN Bob Williams Award for Biggest Home State Win.
Thanks to these two SPN partners, Mississippi families are on a clear path to prosperity.
Flattening Ohio’s taxes
Second to no income taxes, flat income taxes are the proven policy to foster economic growth and fiscal responsibility.
Flat income taxes give taxpayers clarity on their tax burden and force accountability for lawmakers wanting to raise income taxes. In other words, it’s harder to raise taxes if you must admit it will hurt everyday workers instead of just the “millionaires and billionaires.”
Unfortunately, like the majority of states that levy income taxes, Ohio has had a progressive income tax since the 1970s. As The Buckeye Institute explains, “Ohio policymakers have debated income tax reform for decades. A six-bracket tax structure with a 3.5 percent max rate in the 1970s swelled to nine brackets with a 7.5 percent top rate by the 1990s, and more families kept less of their money.”
However, in recent years, as more and more states have moved from progressive income taxes to flat taxes—or no income taxes at all—Buckeye’s team saw an opportunity to give Ohioans the tax relief they’ve been desperately needing for decades.
So, Buckeye’s experts created model legislation that would gradually shift the state to a flat income tax and set the new income tax at an affordable 2.75%. Then after creating their model legislation, Buckeye’s team worked with legislators to get the reform through the legislative (and political) process.
Finally, when Ohio Governor Mike DeWine passed the 2025 state budget, Ohio—thanks in large part to the Buckeye Institute—joined the flat tax revolution.
Moving forward, Ohioans will not only experience tax relief, they’ll see how flat taxes can transform a state’s economy and outlook.
Reforming property taxes in Texas
In so many states across the country, property taxes represent the perennially increasing, increasingly unaffordable expense that never goes away. And while states like Illinois, New Jersey, and California are famous for their unaffordable property taxes, for years, Texas has surprisingly also been on that list.
From 1998 to 2017, property taxes in Texas rose 212%.
So, the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) got to work.
TPPF has long been one of the most influential voices advocating for responsible and affordable tax reform in Texas. Thanks to TPPF, Texas lawmakers and taxpayers have reliable and trustworthy, liberty-minded expertise in nearly every public policy area from education, to tax and budget, to criminal justice, environmental, and everything in between.
TPPF’s long list of accomplishments in property tax reform meant they were perfectly suited to help formulate the best property tax proposal.
TPPF’s proposal would gradually reduce Texans’ property taxes while ensuring funding for critical government services (namely schools) wouldn’t be put at risk. TPPF developed their plan to gradually eliminate the school maintenance and operations (M&O) property tax, which represents nearly half the local property tax burden, and use money from the state surplus to ensure public education remains properly funded.
The TPPF proposal doesn’t simply lower one tax just to raise another. The state would increase its share of public education funding which protects taxpayers from out-of-control spending. Also, critical to TPPF’s plan would be its responsible implementation. Depending on state general revenue growth and spending in other areas of the budget, it would take roughly a decade for the plan to be implemented fully.
All TPPF’s work paid off.
During the November 2025 election, voters approved a constitutional amendment that cemented in property tax cuts for many homeowners. Also, Governor Greg Abbott and many state legislators have announced plans to overhaul Texas’ property tax system in the years to come.
Protecting transparency in Kansas’ taxes
Balanced budgets—meaning actual balanced budgets—aren’t a difficult thing to understand, but are a rare thing to see in government.
In 2025, half the country, 25 states, didn’t have enough money to cover their bills, despite having balanced budgets on paper.
While there are many reasons why balanced state budgets are too rarely a reality, an important one is a lack of transparency in the budgeting process. To help address this, the Kansas Policy Institute championed the Kansas “Truth in Taxation” law. In short, the law would give taxpayers, the media, and legislators more information and data into government budgets and finances. Kansas leaders passed the Truth in Taxation law in 2021 and as a result, Kansas taxpayers saw more open and honest budgeting and lower taxes.
However, despite Truth in Taxation benefiting taxpayers, local governments weren’t always as enthusiastic about the increased scrutiny into their spending and budgeting. So following complaints from several city and county governments, some legislators attempted to repeal the Truth in Taxation law. Thankfully for taxpayers, however, just as they spearheaded passing the law in the first place, the Kansas Policy Institute launched a full-throated defense.
Kansas Policy wrote multiple pieces of commentary and research to debunk complaints about the law and show how Truth in Taxation benefitted taxpayers. By mobilizing grassroots support and educating lawmakers on the real benefits to taxpayers, Kansas Policy was able to stave off the threat to Truth in Taxation. The Kansas Senate rejected the law’s repeal.
Thanks to the Kansas Policy Institute, Kansas taxpayers still have the best fiscal protection there is: sunshine.
Pausing pork in South Carolina
Google “government pork” and you’ll see the ridiculous things tax dollars are spent on. While silly or confusing government spending is an easy target for budget hawks and grandstanding politicians, unaffordable government earmarks represent real drains on budgets and challenges for governments trying to prioritize critical services. And earmarks are almost always slipped into budgets without publicity or fanfare.
That is why the South Carolina Policy Council (SCPC) decided to push for solutions. While the SCPC has long been a reliable voice for government transparency, at the beginning of the 2025 budget process, SCPC experts began working with lawmakers on a bold proposal: No pork.
Data showed how earmarks represented hundreds of millions in the state’s budget. While not all earmark spending is necessarily wasteful, the fact that almost all of it happens without oversight or press coverage creates dangerous incentives and structures.
So SCPC experts began working with lawmakers to prevent legislators from secretly putting earmarks in the state’s 2025 budget. For months, SCPC played a pivotal role in pushing reform by emphasizing the need for fiscal restraint and transparency in the budgeting process. The campaign worked. As SCPC explains, “On June 25, 2025, Governor Henry McMaster signed an Executive Order requiring state agencies to disclose all official and unofficial funding requests from lawmakers to the Governor’s Office within 48 hours of the General Assembly ratifying the annual Appropriations Act. These reports are to be made public in response to FOIA requests. Agencies are prohibited from spending any requested funds without properly disclosing requests to the Governor’s Office. The order, also requires agencies to post spending details as outlined in this year’s budget bill and update their websites quarterly. Failure to do so can result in their funds being returned to the General Fund.”
As long as governments exist, wasteful spending will too. But thanks to the South Carolina Policy Council, South Carolina pork is being reduced, slowed down, and finally brought to the light.
Expanding housing in Hawaii
Taxes, budgets, and jobs are important elements of a state’s economy, but without a home, those all take a backseat.
The Grassroot Institute of Hawaii has won an important victory improving housing affordability and increasing the supply of housing in, what can only accurately be called, paradise.
In 2024, Grassroot released a report outlining some of the most effective ways to speed up permitting and increase Hawaii’s housing supply. Each solution in the report represented a desperately needed reform. They highlighted how the state needed to make it easier to build Additional Dwelling Units (ADUs), reform how localities levied fees for new construction, and force local governments and state agencies to issue permits in a timely and efficient way.
Experts from Grassroot have been front and center on these issues for years, and thanks to their continued advocacy and work, Hawaii legislators passed many of the reforms in the Grassroot report and are finally addressing the Aloha State’s housing supply problems.
Spreading REINS nationwide
The Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny Act (REINS) allows Congress to automatically review and approve any federal regulation with a financial impact over $100 million before it’s allowed to go into effect.
As we’ve seen too often, an out-of-control administrative state and executive overreach can lead to significant problems for taxpayers, property owners, and Americans interested in restricting government overreach. The REINS Act helps solve this.
This year, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Utah, Louisiana, and North Carolina all passed state-level REINS Acts. They now join a number of other states actively working to reinstate responsible governing and the separation of powers.
Economies are more than facts and figures, dollar signs and data points. They’re the direction of people’s lives and the prosperity or pain they feel on a daily basis. Thanks to SPN partners around the country, state economies are growing stronger and more prosperous. And while there’s still more that needs done, that growth represents real progress for millions of Americans.