Business Blog

The Mississippi Legislature is set to adjourn April 7 with no deal in sight on a federal offer to expand Medicaid. The ticking clock has executives of hospitals around the state worried that time will expire and hospitals and the entire health care sector will suffer the consequences, putting about 9,000 jobs at risk. Ahead [...]

Georgia is considering a law we can only hope speedily finds its way from Atlanta’s Gold Dome, west on Interstate-20 through Alabama and on to Mississippi’s Capitol in Jackson. Call it the “Get Out of the Way” law drafted in a state where left lane slow-pokes are typically advised to “either run with the big [...]

Here is the White House says the across-the-board automatic budget cuts set to begin Friday under the fiscal sequester deal between Congress and the Obama Administration will mean for Mississippi. The cuts threaten hundreds of thousands of middle class jobs, and cut vital services for children, seniors, people with mental illness and our men and [...]

The number of governors refusing to accept the federal offer of hundreds of millions of dollars for expanding Medicaid to their state’s working poor is dwindling, with Florida Gov. Rick Scott Wednesday joining Ohio’s Gov. John Kasich and Michigan’s Rick Snyder in accepting the offer. More than two dozen governors continue to hold out against [...]

Luther Munford, a veteran Jackson attorney who wrote the book on Mississippi appellate law, has joined Butler Snow as a member of the Ridgeland-based firm’s Appellate and Written Advocacy Practice Group.   Munford, previously of Phelps Dunbar, will “certainly strengthen our appellate team,” said Donald Clark Jr., Butler Snow chairman. Munford is a 1976 graduate [...]

The Mississippi Economic Council Insight Tour has a couple of more weeks to go before arriving in Hattiesburg on March 1 for its final stop. The tour, which began in Gulfport on Jan. 24, is gathering thoughts and suggestions on strengthening the state’s business climate and offers participants a chance to network with business people [...]

Amazon.com is clearly in a bind as states grow more eager to tax the online sales of the world’s largest cyber retailer. That makes it difficult to understand why Mississippi doesn’t stop digging through the couch cushions for loose change when it instead could get in line for a well deserved payday. If nothing else, [...]

Whiplash could be a consequence of watching recent action in the Legislature to determine the next home of the Mississippi Department of Revenue. The day before a bill to put the DOR headquarters in downtown Jackson’s Landmark Center via a $7.6 purchase passed the Senate on a 48-2 vote, House Speaker Philip Gunn successfully pushed [...]

State Sen. David Blount’s is seeing early success with a pair of bills to consolidate 28 state offices now scattered throughout the metro area into privately owned vacant office space within the Capitol Complex, an area extending from downtown to Lakeland Drive. Blount’s bill has won approval from the Senate Public Property Committee and now [...]

Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood now has ample company in a fight to force Standard and Poor’s to give up hundreds of millions it made in profits in exchange for suspect ratings of mortgage bonds before the financial crisis of 2008. In essence, enforcement actions filed Tuesday by the states and U.S. Justice Department accuse [...]