SEPTEMBER 2017
OKLAHOMA COUNCIL OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS
Subsidies for higher education are not a high priority for taxpayers in this reddest of red states. And now, new data show that nearly two in three conservative Republicans say colleges and universities are having a negative effect on the way things are going in the country. For higher education officials eager to stanch the appropriations decline, we offer some commonsense ideas for
Reforming Higher Education
In Case You Missed It Oklahoma’s chancellor of higher education, a former politician (naturally), is paid more than $411,000 annually.
Have Oklahoma’s political leaders been vindicated in their raid of the Rainy Day Fund? ocpa.co/OKRainyDayFund
ocpa.co/TW_StateSalaries
Writing in The Wall Street Journal, OCPA trustees Frank Keating and Doug Beall say it’s time to return Medicaid to its rightful role. ocpa.co/KeatingBeall
Sometimes the political class uses ratings agencies as weapons against taxpayers.
The four-year graduation rate at Cameron University is 9.6 percent. ocpa.co/CameronGradRate
A liberal U.S. Senator is attacking EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt— and trying to get the Oklahoma Bar Association to do his dirty work for him. ocpa.co/OBAattacksPruitt
ocpa.co/Rating-Agencies
In a new PragerU video, Denisha Merriweather says “school choice saved my life.”
A reduction in the gender pay gap would come at a huge cost: Several thousand more women will be killed each year.
ocpa.co/PragerU-SchoolChoice
PERSPECTIVE
A former Oklahoma statefinance official warns of the problems with crony capitalism and socialized “economic development.” ocpa.co/CronyCapitalism
President Trump’s labor secretary is telling state lawmakers to fix occupational licensing. ocpa.co/OccupationalLicensing
One economist says switching to markets could save you 15 percent or more on climate insurance. ocpa.co/IERClimateInsurance
An AEI scholar asks: Are universities driving racism?
ocpa.co/AEI_GenderPayGap
bit.ly/UnivRacism
Brandon Dutcher, Editor
OCPA Trustees
OCPA Researchers
Glenn Ashmore • Oklahoma City
Patrick T. Rooney • Oklahoma City
Robert D. Avery • Pawhuska
Melissa Sandefer • Norman
Lee J. Baxter • Lawton
Thomas Schroedter • Tulsa
Douglas Beall, M.D. • Oklahoma City
Greg Slavonic • Oklahoma City
Inc., an independent public policy
Susan Bergen • Norman
Charles M. Sublett • Tulsa
organization. OCPA formulates and
John A. Brock • Tulsa
Robert Sullivan • Tulsa
David Burrage • Atoka
William E. Warnock, Jr. • Tulsa
Michael Carnuccio • Yukon
Dana Weber • Tulsa
analysis consistent with the principles
William Flanagan • Claremore
Molly Wehrenberg • Edmond
of free enterprise and limited
Josephine Freede • Oklahoma City
Daryl Woodard • Tulsa
Perspective is published monthly by the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs,
promotes public policy research and
government. The views expressed in Perspective are those of the author, and should not be construed as representing any official position of OCPA or its trustees, researchers, or employees.
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PERSPECTIVE // September 2017
Ann Felton Gilliland • Oklahoma City John A. Henry III • Oklahoma City Robert Kane • Tulsa Frank Keating • Oklahoma City Gene Love • Lawton
EMERITUS BOARD
David Madigan • Lawton
Blake Arnold • Oklahoma City
Tom H. McCasland III • Duncan
Steve W. Beebe • Duncan
David McLaughlin • Enid
David R. Brown, M.D. • Oklahoma City
J. Larry Nichols • Oklahoma City
Paul A. Cox • Oklahoma City
Lloyd Noble II • Tulsa
John T. Hanes • Oklahoma City
Mike O’Neal • Edmond
Henry F. Kane • Bartlesville
Andrew Oster • Edmond
Lew Meibergen • Enid
Larry Parman • Oklahoma City
Ronald L. Mercer • Bethany
Bill Price • Oklahoma City
Daniel J. Zaloudek • Tulsa
Tina Dzurisin Research Associate Trent England, J.D. Dr. David and Ann Brown Distinguished Fellow for the Advancement of Liberty J. Scott Moody, M.A. Research Fellow Andrew C. Spiropoulos, J.D. Milton Friedman Distinguished Fellow Wendy P. Warcholik, Ph.D. Research Fellow
Larry Arnn
Arthur Brooks
William F. Buckley
George W. Bush
DENNIS PRAGER “One of America’s five best speakers.” — Toastmasters
Jeb Bush
October 19 • Tulsa
Dinesh D’Souza Mitch Daniels
J. Rufus Fears
Brit Hume
Steve Forbes
For more information, contact Rachel Hays at 405.602.1667 or rachel@ocpathink.org.
Tommy Franks
John Fund
Jim DeMint
Charles Krauthammer
Art Laffer
Russell Moore Stephen Moore Peggy Noonan Marvin Olasky
Sarah Palin
Ed Meese
Star Parker
Dana Perino Michael Reagan
Clarence Thomas
Artur Davis
Newt Gingrich David Horowitz Mike Huckabee
Laura Ingraham Frank Keating Brian Kilmeade Jeane Kirkpatrick
Rich Lowry
Cal Thomas
Dick Cheney
Scott Walker
Paul Ryan
Joe Sobran
John Walton
J.C.Watts
Past OCPA speakers are pictured above.
Thomas Stafford John Stossel
Allen West
Walter Williams
The Higher Ed Defunding That’s Yet to Come?
By Brandon Dutcher
This is Oklahoma—not Oregon or Vermont. When will higher ed of f icials wake up?
There’s been much hand-wringing lately among some higher-education officials and journalists (to the extent those can be distinguished) about Oklahoma’s recent reduction in government spending on higher education. We already know that Oklahomans do not place a high priority on taxpayer subsidies for higher education. In December 2016 OCPA commissioned SoonerPoll to ask likely voters this question: “The legislature is trying to prioritize areas of state spending. Which of the following areas of spending would you prioritize as most important?” The clear winner was “K-12 schools” at 47 percent. “Roads and other transportation expenses” came in second at 20 percent, followed by “health care” (19 percent), “public safety” (9 percent), and “colleges and universities” (5 percent). Given that the survey has a margin of error of plus/minus 4.6 percent, I couldn’t help but recall an amusing incident from U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter’s uninspiring run for president back in 1995. “You’re at 1 percent,” his fellow candidate Pat Buchanan quipped, “and that poll’s got a 3 percent margin of error. There’s a possibility Arlen Specter doesn’t exist.” Enthusiasm for higher ed subsidies does exist, but just barely. As OU emeritus professor William W. Savage, Jr. wrote in a recent essay at NonDoc.com, “Take away the Greek system and NCAA sports and tell students they can’t park on campus, and lawmakers would see how much public support for higher ed remains.” Comes now a new finding from the Pew Research Center which should, but probably won’t, serve as a wake-up call. “Today, for the first time on a question
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PERSPECTIVE // September 2017
asked since 2010, a majority (58%) of Republicans say colleges and universities are having a negative effect on the way things are going in the country, while 36% say they have a positive effect,” Pew reported. Among conservatives, the findings are even more startling: Fully 65 percent of conservative Republicans—nearly two in three—say colleges are having a negative effect on the way things are going in the country. American Enterprise Institute adjunct scholar Richard Vedder, who helps compile the annual college rankings for Forbes, tells of an e-mail conversation he once had with one of the 20th century’s greatest economists, Milton Friedman. “The spread of PC [political correctness] right now would seem to be a very strong negative externality, and certainly the 1960s student demonstrations were negative externalities from higher education,” Friedman said. “A full analysis along those lines might lead you to conclude that higher education should be taxed to offset its negative externalities.” At least one honest liberal can read the writing on the wall. In a recent blog post (“The mass defunding of higher education that’s yet to come”), which later appeared also as a Los Angeles Times op-ed, leftist academic Fredrik deBoer said this Pew survey result “represents a crisis.” “I am increasingly convinced that a mass defunding of public higher education is coming to an unprecedented degree and at an unprecedented scale,” he wrote. “People enjoy telling me that this has already occurred, as if I am not sufficiently informed about higher education to know that state support of our public universities has declined
precipitously. But things can always get worse, much worse. And given the endless controversies on college campuses of conservative speakers getting shut out and conservative students feeling silenced, and given how little the average academic seems to care about appealing to the conservative half of this country, the PR work is being done for the enemies of public education by those within the institutions themselves. … “Meanwhile, in my very large network of professional academics, almost no one recognizes any threat at all. Many, I can say with great confidence, would reply to the [Pew] poll above with glee. They would tell you that they don’t want the support of Republicans. There’s little attempt to grapple with the simple, pragmatic realities of political power and how it threatens vulnerable institutions whose funding is in doubt. That’s because there is no professional or social incentive in the academy to think strategically or to understand that there is a world beyond campus. Instead, all of the incentives point towards constantly affirming one’s position in the moral aristocracy that the academy has imagined itself as.” Do Oklahoma’s higher education officials not see this? In a state where political-correctness slayer Donald Trump won 77 of 77 counties, one hopes these officials will give serious consideration to the reforms proposed in this month’s issue of Perspective. Brandon Dutcher is OCPA’s senior vice president. He is editor of the book Oklahoma Policy Blueprint, which was praised by Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman as “thorough, well-informed, and highly sophisticated.” His articles have appeared in Investor’s Business Daily, WORLD magazine, Forbes. com, Mises.org, The Oklahoman, the Tulsa World, and 200 newspapers throughout Oklahoma and the U.S.
Three Higher Ed Reform Ideas Over the past few years the higher education establishment in Oklahoma has repeatedly warned that their mission of education is being compromised by a funding crisis. They want more money but offer nothing in return. Administrators have turned a blind eye to glaring problems and excesses in Oklahoma’s colleges and universities. They’re not rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic—they’re enlarging the hole in the ship by doubling down on mismanagement, politicization, and exploitation. Higher education will never reform itself. Effective change will have to be imposed by the Legislature and people of Oklahoma. To that end, I propose a simple three-point reform plan. The first reform is adoption of the Kalven Report. This statement, drafted in 1967 at the University of Chicago, affirms that institution’s dedication to free speech, open discussion, and scholarly inquiry unimpeded by political correctness. In 2015, Chicago reaffirmed its commitment to free speech, noting “it is not the proper role of the University to attempt to shield individuals from ideas and opinions they find unwelcome, disagreeable, or even deeply offensive.” Princeton and Purdue University are among the institutions that have formally endorsed the Kalven Report. Oklahoma’s colleges desperately need to adopt an official policy of intellectual and political tolerance. In 2016, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) named OU as one of the 10 worst colleges in the United States for free speech. Greg Lukianoff, a liberal Democrat who serves as the president of FIRE, singled out OU as the most intolerant of all institutions because its actions were taken as a signal by other universities that they could “toss freedom of speech and basic fairness out of the window.” The administration and Faculty Senate at OU have instructed members of the campus community to report incidents of “hate speech” to the police. What is “hate
speech”? It’s anything that a person finds offensive. Keep in mind that if you say something as innocuous as “I support President Trump,” a number of people on the OU campus would categorize this as “hate speech.” Ironically, the obsession with suppressing “hate speech” has transformed the OU campus into the most intolerant and hateful place in the entire state. On November 15, 2016, a person was reported to the OU Police for the “crime” of Christian proselytizing. On February 2, 2017, two peaceful people holding signs supporting President Trump were physically assaulted on the OU campus. Second, as a first step towards reversing politicization, abolish the “Studies” programs. Women’s and Gender Studies, African-American Studies, and Native-American Studies have never been fields of legitimate academic inquiry. These programs are devoted to promoting radical left-wing ideologies that subvert American values of individualism, democracy, tolerance, and freedom. Students in “Studies” programs are taught that the United States is a vile, racist nation where anyone who is not a white male is oppressed and disenfranchised. Young minds are filled with envy, resentment, and anger. The bitter fruit of this instruction is political violence. Whenever the higher education establishment wants more money, they trot out the old argument that higher education is essential to Oklahoma’s economy. It is. But there are no jobs for people with degrees in “Women’s and Gender Studies.” Employment opportunities are in areas like computer science, engineering, and nursing. Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, recently pleaded that students be taught computer programming. This year, the Oklahoma Legislature cut the higher education budget by six percent. How did the University of Oklahoma respond? They hired three new faculty members for the Native-American Studies program.
By David Deming
Recommendations • Adopt the Kalven Report to protect free speech • Abolish the various grievancestudies majors • Limit salaries through a constitutional amendment Third, limit salaries through a constitutional amendment so that no individual in higher education can be paid more money than the Oklahoma governor. The governor’s salary is $147,000. A U.S. congressman makes $174,000. The median family income in Oklahoma is about $48,000. Yet according to OklahomaWatchData.org, 100 individuals at OU earn more than $207,000 annually. There’s also a dirty little secret hiding in plain sight. Many of the courses at OU are not taught by the elite professors, but by temporary instructors who can be paid as little as $20,000 or less. According to OU's Office of Institutional Statistics, in the fall of 2016 the University employed a total of 163 “renewable term” employees. The exploitation of these people is reprehensible. Oklahoma’s institutions of higher education are politicized, inefficient, and out of touch. They have evolved to serve an elite group of insiders who are exploiting the system for personal and political gain. If the universities are to recapture their mission of education, drastic and immediate reforms are needed.
Dr. David Deming (Ph.D. in geophysics, University of Utah) is professor of arts and sciences at the University of Oklahoma.
www.ocpathink.org
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A Solution to the Campus Free-Speech Crisis When you suggest that someone should act like an adult and then that person demands you be fired, you’re either part of a reality TV show or on a college campus. Ratings guard free speech in the former, while free speech is in peril in the latter. At many of America’s colleges and universities, an obsession with safe spaces and safe ideas is poisoning higher education and stifling those on both sides of the political spectrum. Exhibit A is Northern Arizona University, where President Rita Cheng said earlier this year she wasn’t sure she supported “safe spaces”—cordoned-off areas of campus reserved for students to avoid ideas with which they don’t agree. “I think that you as a student have to develop the skills to be successful in this world and that we need to provide you with the opportunity for discourse and debate,” said Cheng. Students wanted none of it and called for her resignation. At Evergreen State College in Washington state, a school that calls itself “progressive,” students shouted down professor Bret Weinstein after he said white members of the campus community should not be forced to leave campus for a day. Weinstein, a 14-year veteran of the school, was a
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PERSPECTIVE // September 2017
By Jonathan Butcher
supporter of both Occupy Wall Street and Sen. Bernie Sanders. Yet Evergreen State students wanted him silenced for daring to voice what they viewed as nonconformist ideas. Students succeeded in rattling the administration. Evergreen officials moved graduation off-campus and closed campus twice prior to the ceremony, all because of student uprisings and threats of violence that followed. And protestors were excused from homework assignments during their demonstrations. Oklahoma campuses are not immune. In 2016, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education named the University of Oklahoma and the University of Tulsa among the 10 worst colleges in the U.S. for free speech. The University of Tulsa earned the distinction not only for suspending a student because of a message posted on social media, but also for threatening the student newspaper with discipline because of the paper’s coverage of the activity. To restore free speech to its rightful place on campus, the Goldwater Institute partnered with Stanley Kurtz of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. and designed a model bill for state
Our model bill requires state universities to make the protection of free speech a lawmakers to protect free expression (available at bit.ly/2tfKKT0). Legislators in Virginia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Louisiana, North Carolina, and California have considered bills based on the legislation this year. In Wisconsin, Gov. Scott Walker has voiced his support for such legislation.
Recommendations
priority, starting at the top: • Schools must take an official policy in favor of free speech and make this statement readily available on campus documents, such as student conduct handbooks; • A subcommittee of the
Our model legislation also includes a requirement that campus officials communicate the school’s commitment to free speech at freshman orientation. For University of Oklahoma students, this should be mandatory in order to counterbalance the five-hour diversity training requirement and new Bias Response Team. Bias response teams are notorious around the country for anonymous reporting of perceived slights that result in laborious investigations and create a culture of suspicion, not free ideas. Oklahoma’s universities need look no further than to OCPA’s Andrew Spiropoulos or Trent England for help with free-speech orientation sessions. “The university must do everything possible to ensure within it the fullest degree of intellectual freedom,” wrote the authors of Yale’s “Woodward Report,” a seminal document on protecting free speech released some 40 years ago. Nearly a half-century later, schools across the country are failing to protect free expression—some embarrassingly so. State lawmakers should consider the primacy of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, an idea on which so many other freedoms rest, and make their most important gift to young adults an appreciation of the same. Jonathan Butcher (M.A. in economics, University of Arkansas) is a senior policy analyst at The Heritage Foundation and a senior fellow at the Goldwater Institute. His work has appeared in EducationNext, the Georgetown Journal of Law and Public Policy, The Wall Street Journal, Education Week, National Review Online, and several other newspapers across the country.
university board must issue a report each year on the condition of free speech across campuses in the state system; • Administrators may not disinvite speakers, regardless of how controversial such speakers may be; • Anyone lawfully present on campus may protest or demonstrate there; • Any individual that materially or forcibly interferes with the free speech rights of others may be subject to disciplinary sanctions; and • Universities must strive to be neutral on public policy issues of the day so that individuals on campus—like
Does OU Believe in Free Speech? University of Oklahoma President David Boren has announced that he wants “hate speech” reported to the university’s police department. In the illiberal environment cultivated by OU leadership, “hate speech” doesn’t mean Klansmen burning crosses on front lawns. One OU professor called the police after being handed an evangelistic tract; that’s core speech about ideas if anything is. OU Vice President Jabar Shumate has made comments suggesting support for Donald Trump is “hate speech.” And of course all this is on top of the dense layers of one-sided indoctrination about diversity and sexual identity to which all students at OU, like at almost every other American university, are required to submit. Recently, OU expelled students for using racial epithets, in flagrant violation of long-established First Amendment law. Six months later, the university paid $40,000 for a performance by a hip-hop artist who uses the same derogatory epithets. He also insults homosexuals, brags about physically abusing women in their genitals (hello, Donald Trump supporters!), and calls for the murder of police officers. Respect and toleration for others apparently go only one way at OU. The question here is not whether the people targeted by OU in these cases are right or wrong. The question is whether OU believes that wrong ideas are best corrected and right ideas are best vindicated through open discussion and debate in a social atmosphere of free inquiry for all sides. The particular merits of the speech acts at issue in these controversies are, here as always, irrelevant to the question of whether everyone ought to have free speech.
students and faculty— can take positions on controversial issues and not fear reprisal from the school.
Greg Forster writing in the March 2017 issue of Perspective
www.ocpathink.org
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Diversity and Community on Campus As students arrive back at college this fall, the state of community on campus has been a hot topic all summer. It’s usually framed as a tradeoff between student rights to free speech and the solidarity of the community. In fact, giving students back their rights is the only hope to get real community back as well. It’s an open question whether a mainstream college can be anything like a community today. The question has been raised by news stories ranging from the special graduation ceremony for black students at Harvard University to the violent attacks on speaker Charles Murray at Middlebury College (which went unpunished, establishing tacit university approval of the violence) to the campus-wide anarchy at Evergreen State College. Stories like Middlebury and Evergreen State, as well as the pushing out of unfairly targeted faculty at Yale University and other recent events, show how coercion in the name of community actually undermines community. More and more heavy-handed tactics are used
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PERSPECTIVE // September 2017
to expel allegedly hateful or unacceptable speech. The stated goal of this coercion is to establish community. But it polarizes the campus and incentivizes more conflict. The dominant group, on the political Left, learns from these episodes that getting offended brings power. Stigmatizing people and destroying their
By Greg Forster
back with equally divisive tactics is the only realistic response to their oppressed state. Worse, conservative websites and activists make big bucks circulating stories of on-campus outrage for clicks and donations. Of course, these high-profile confrontations are only more obvious examples of the underlying principle
The University of Oklahoma’s mandatory student diversity training is a horrifying recital of coercive tactics, clearly designed not to educate students about diversity (which would be valuable) so much as to manipulate, threaten, and control them so they don’t think the wrong things. lives pays off. By crushing their victims, they establish themselves as the people who must be kept happy if peace is to be maintained. The oppressed minority group, on the political Right, is also incentivized to escalate the conflict. Increasingly, conservative students conclude that they are desperately besieged, and fighting
of the normal power structure in the university. Just check out the University of Oklahoma’s webpage on its mandatory student diversity training. It’s a horrifying recital of coercive tactics, clearly designed not to educate students about diversity (which would be valuable) so much as to manipulate, threaten, and control them so they don’t think the wrong things. There’s
a whole section of the mandatory training called “Learning to Interact.” If you claim the right to teach me how to interact with others, you are trying to put yourself in control of what I am allowed to think. Learning and education can only happen where people are free to speak and interact spontaneously so they are able to think for themselves. Community can only happen where people are free to speak and interact spontaneously so they are able to have authentic relationships. Community has to be voluntary. You can't build community by arbitrarily expelling some of the community’s members on political grounds. That destroys the bond of mutual commitment that constitutes the community. Real community exists where people who are different look at each other and say, “we are stuck with you; you are one of us whether we like you or not.” Harvard’s black commencement ceremony is the exception that proves the rule. Contrary to widespread misperception, it was a great expression of community. It was a student-run, unofficial event that took place two days before the official ceremony, and thus did not affect it. Anyone was permitted to attend the event. In other words, a private student group held its own event on campus, celebrating something it wanted to celebrate—its positive sense of its own identity and achievements. That’s a perfect example of what happens in real communities. It’s no more a threat to the solidarity of the broader, multiethnic university than a “Kiss me, I’m Irish” button. Here is how this exception proves the rule: Much of the anxiety in response to this event arises, perhaps unconsciously, from the knowledge that not all students enjoy the same right to do this kind of thing. A conservative student graduation would probably have been shut down, or at least harassed and marginalized, by the university administration. If you don’t think
so, you don’t know what it’s like to be a conservative student on an Ivy League campus. “You’re allowed to have your own thing, but we aren’t allowed to have ours” is the thought in the back of people’s minds when they say to the organizers of events like the black graduation, “you’re being divisive when you insist on having your own thing.” If everybody could have their own thing, nobody would care. Granted, this is not the only factor. There has always been some anxiety about ethnic identity in America, given our national commitment to trans-ethnic political principles (“we hold these truths…”). Some people have always gotten nervous about “Kiss me, I’m Irish” buttons. But it would be naïve to think that the response to the black graduation wasn’t greatly exacerbated by the sense on the Right that university administrators have their thumbs on the scales of justice.
If we want real community and respect for diversity on campus, here are some reforms to consider:
Recommendations As the campus meltdowns of the past spring show, schools have to get ahead of these problems before they start. When the crisis comes, it’s too late to defuse the tensions of polarization. Community can only be built when there is no urgent need to build it. Greg Forster (Ph.D., Yale University) is a
• Formalize student speech and association codes: In response to recent disruptions, some schools (including Princeton University) have strengthened their formal, public commitment to defend students’ rights. Every school should do this; public schools with recalcitrant administrations should be forced to do it. • Reform diversity training: Gather students representing a broad array of constituencies—Right as well as Left, Christian as well as other religions—and give them real power to introduce reforms in diversity training. Let them spend a year just talking to each other about how to own one another first, and then another year working on specific reforms. The small army of diversity professionals in the administration should coordinate and support but not lead this effort. • Penalize those who use coercion: Evergreen State College is belatedly awakening to the need for disciplinary action against students who seek to silence dissent by force. In fact, given that a university strives to be not only a community but a community of learning, violence deployed against speech acts should be punished with special severity.
Friedman Fellow with EdChoice. He is the author of six books, including John Locke’s Politics of Moral Consensus (Cambridge
• Celebrate real community: Organize
University Press, 2005), and the co-editor of
student events, like debates, that
four books, including John Rawls and Christian
establish the bonds of community—of
Social Engagement: Justice as Unfairness. He has written numerous articles in peer-reviewed
mutual commitment to one another—
academic journals as well as in popular
across lines of difference.
publications such as The Washington Post and the Chronicle of Higher Education.
www.ocpathink.org
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Oklahoma State Government Spending Is Higher than Ever $20,000 $18,000 $16,000 $14,000 $12,000 $10,000 $8,000 $6,000 $4,000 $2,000 Millions
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By Curtis Shelton and Dave Bond
In discussions about taxes and state government spending in Oklahoma, some advocates insist that available funding has been slashed to the bone for important public services. The claim is simply not true. While state appropriations in Oklahoma have fallen below previous years, total state government spending in Oklahoma is higher than ever—more than $3.83 billion higher than it was 10 years ago. It’s important to understand the difference between state appropriations and total state government spending. State appropriations make up “the state budget” that lawmakers at the state Capitol vote on every legislative session in order to provide a portion of the funding for specific state agencies. Total state spending, on the other hand, is the sum of all the many different sources of funding that flow to—and are spent by—Oklahoma’s state government agencies each year. This includes state appropriations, as well as federal grants, non-appropriated spending, “off the top” apportionments, and more. For the last several years, state appropriations have made up only about 40 percent of total state government spending in Oklahoma. There are some key economic factors we need to keep in mind. In fiscal year (FY) 2008, the price of West Texas Intermediate crude oil topped $133 per barrel, an all-time high, dramatically benefiting Oklahoma’s economy—and tax collections. Oil prices were also very high in 2013 and 2014, benefiting Oklahoma tax collections, and appropriations, considerably. Then, as 2014 progressed, oil prices plummeted as Saudi Arabia and other OPEC member nations in effect imposed economic sanctions on U.S. shale drilling states, including Oklahoma. Over the next two years, tens of thousands of Oklahomans lost employment in the energy sector. A number of Oklahoma-based
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PERSPECTIVE // September 2017
energy companies declared bankruptcy. These developments hit the state’s economy—and tax collections—hard. With this in mind, it shouldn’t be a surprise that appropriations for Oklahoma’s state government today are less than when oil prices regularly exceeded $100 per barrel. What may surprise some, however, is that, except for a small blip downward in FY 2015, total annual spending by Oklahoma’s state government has consistently risen. In FY 2007, total spending by Oklahoma’s state government was $14.13 billion. In FY 2016, the most recent fiscal year for which full data is available, total state government spending in Oklahoma topped $17.96 billion. In other words, total state government spending in Oklahoma is $3.83 billion higher today than 10 years ago, an increase of more than 27 percent. Some will note that, despite the increase in total state government spending, state expenditures for public education are presently below previous years. Fortunately, thanks to rising collections in ad valorem taxes—i.e., property taxes, which are collected and spent by local governments, rather than by state government—total revenues for Oklahoma public schools have consistently grown over the past 10 years and are now at record highs. Curtis Shelton is a policy research fellow at OCPA. He holds a B.A. in finance from Oklahoma State University and previously served as a staff accountant for Sutherland Global Services. Dave Bond is vice president for advocacy at OCPA. Since 2011, he has advocated at the Oklahoma state Capitol on issues of free enterprise, individual initiative, and limited government. He has been referred to in the Tulsa World as “a prominent Oklahoma anti-tax lobbyist.”
Kansas Tax Cuts Were Successful By Dave Bond
The liberal media ignore the many successes of the Kansas income-tax cuts. On June 6, the Kansas Legislature voted to roll back hundreds of millions of dollars of income tax relief enacted during the preceding five years. Beginning in 2012, Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback signed into law a series of reforms that lowered the state’s top personal income tax rate to 4.6 percent. It will now rise to 5.7 percent. Gov. Brownback’s 2012 reforms also eliminated income taxes for pass-through businesses, including most small businesses. Not anymore. Additionally, more than 300,000 lower-income Kansans will go back onto the income tax rolls after being previously relieved of that burden. Gov. Brownback vetoed the legislation rolling back all this tax relief. But after overriding his veto, Kansas legislators are now the darlings of liberal media nationwide. The New York Times, MSNBC, CNN, and many more gloried in the defeat of Gov. Brownback and his efforts to let Kansans keep more of the fruits of their own labor. The evidence, however, suggests the liberal media’s narrative—that the Kansas tax cuts were a failure—is false. Kansas has certainly been hit hard by falling prices for commodities—oil, corn, wheat—on which the state’s economy relies. Even so, Kansas lawmakers have managed to fund public schools at historically high levels. For the 2015-16 school year, state aid funding for public schools was nearly 20 percent higher than before the 2012 tax cuts. Per-pupil funding has risen to more than $13,000 per student. In addition, Kansas’ spending on transportation infrastructure has risen to an all-time high of $1.3 billion annually. In other words, income tax relief hasn’t prevented Kansas from funding the state services taxpayers typically care about most. The evidence also suggests income tax reductions have helped grow Kansas’ private-sector economy. New domestic business filings in Kansas hit record highs every year since the tax cuts were enacted, as did the total number of business entities. In the 14 years before income tax relief, Kansas ranked 41st nationally in private-sector job growth. Following the 2012 tax cuts, Kansas jumped to 31st. Last year, Kansas hit a new record
with 1.157 million private-sector jobs. Kansas GOP moderates, plus left-leaning media in Kansas City, Topeka, and elsewhere, ignore these successes. Republicans dominate Kansas electorally. Most consequential political conflict in the state occurs between the GOP’s conservative and moderate wings. Gov. Brownback aligns with the conservatives. In 2012, the moderates controlled the Kansas Senate and tried unsuccessfully to prevent Gov. Brownback’s tax cuts. Later that year, Gov. Brownback responded by helping see to it that many of them were defeated in their reelection bids by conservative primary challengers. The moderates have craved Gov. Brownback’s scalp ever since. During his 2014 reelection, more than 100 prominent GOP moderates backed his Democrat opponent. The disdain for Gov. Brownback among moderates and liberals isn’t only about taxes. They also resent him for restricting abortions and rejecting Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion. But Donald Trump’s November victory was a setback for abortion proponents and Medicaid expansionists. By comparison, repealing Gov. Brownback’s tax cuts was politically more achievable—even though a late-May poll by Cole Hargrave Snodgrass & Associates showed that Kansas voters opposed raising taxes, preferring instead to reduce state government spending. Kansas will now go from being a low-tax haven for smallbusiness job creators to having a higher income tax burden than most other states in the region. This will reduce Kansas’ viability in the 50-state competition for jobs and economic growth. On the bright side, however, Bernie Sanders is pleased. On June 7, his official Twitter account proclaimed: “Congratulations to Kansas for voting to roll back outrageous tax cuts.”
Dave Bond is vice president for advocacy at OCPA. Since 2011, he has advocated at the Oklahoma state Capitol on issues of free enterprise, individual initiative, and limited government. He has been referred to in the Tulsa World as “a prominent Oklahoma anti-tax lobbyist.”
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The Unfinished Business of Criminal Justice Reform
Jonathan Small is the president of the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs. A Certified Public Accountant, he previously served as a budget analyst for the Oklahoma Office of State Finance, as a fiscal policy analyst and research analyst for the Oklahoma House of Representatives, and as director of government affairs for the Oklahoma Insurance Department. Small’s work includes co-authoring “Economics 101” with Dr. Arthur Laffer and Dr. Wayne Winegarden.
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PERSPECTIVE // September 2017
By Jonathan Small
When Oklahoma voters approved State Questions 780 and 781 in 2016, they made themselves perfectly clear: Criminal justice reform is a top priority for Oklahoma. The success of these questions shows a desire among Oklahomans to break the devastating cycle of recidivism and incarceration by reducing sentences for nonviolent, mostly drugrelated crimes and placing increased importance on rehabilitation and work programs. Unfortunately, criminal justice reform efforts were crowded out in the 2017 legislative session by an executive branch obsession with raising taxes and by the sky-is-falling rhetoric of tax consumers. At the beginning of the 2017 session, the Justice Reform Task Force published a report with 27 policy proposals from its yearlong study. State legislators turned these into a package of 12 bills designed to move Oklahoma toward a redemptive justice system. But only three of the 12 bills passed the legislature and were signed into law. And the three that passed were the low-hanging fruit of criminal justice reform; they deal almost exclusively with establishing procedures to better interact with and care for prisoners, assess prisoners’ needs, and provide counseling for victims of domestic violence. Although still necessary causes, the three bills do nothing to change the sentencing process or stem the flow of nonviolent offenders into permanent incarceration. Nor do they reduce the current prison population or the continuously climbing incarceration rate. The nine other criminal justice reform bills were introduced but either not heard in committee before the end of the session or not passed by both legislative chambers in alternative versions. The good news is that the majority of these bills are expected to be taken up in the 2018 session and contain most of the remaining policy proposals from the Justice Reform Task Force report. Oklahoma has the country’s second-highest imprisonment rate. If trends continue, Oklahoma will be number one on this list by 2018. We already lead the nation when it comes to incarcerating
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women. In 2016, three out of four Oklahomans sent to prison were incarcerated for nonviolent crimes. Compared to our neighbor states, Oklahoma incarcerates many more of these offenders, and we keep them there longer. Criminal justice reform is too important to disregard, and it’s too important to play politics with. Without reform, Oklahoma is on track to add more than 7,000 inmates in the next decade, according to some reports. This would require three new prisons and cost taxpayers about $2 billion. Every dollar spent here is a dollar that could go to teachers, roads, and bridges, or other vital state services. Oklahoma must remain dedicated to breaking the cycle of criminality and giving people the chance to restore their lives and find success in society. Warehousing nonviolent offenders or those with drug addiction or mental illness is not the purpose of the criminal justice system or a wise use of tax dollars. The focus of the 2018 legislative session should be to handle the unfinished business of criminal justice reform.
Thank you so much for being a vital part of the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs! We can’t thank you enough for all that you’ve done to help us champion limited government, individual liberty, and free-market principles in Oklahoma! In order to better serve you, we kindly ask that you take a few minutes to complete the survey on the other side of this page. When you are finished, please tear out the survey and use the included envelope to mail it back to OCPA! The survey is also available online at ocpa.co/OCPAsurvey. All answers are completely anonymous and participation is voluntary. Information gathered by this survey is strictly for use by OCPA to better understand our audience. Surveys and answers will not be used by other parties, sold, published, or otherwise distributed. Thanks again, OCPA Staff
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TO PRESERVE AND BUILD UPON THE LEGACY OF D R . D AV I D & ANN BROWN
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PERSPECTIVE // September 2017
of future generations while decreasing your tax liability. To learn more, contact Rachel Hays at rachel@ocpathink.org or by calling (405) 602-1667.
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On CNBC's "Squawk Box" on July 24, OCPA trustee Frank Keating discussed how the alarming growth of Medicaid is crowding out other items in the state budget.
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OCPA’s Trent England (right) discusses CareerTech and community-college consolidation with journalist Phil Cross of FOX 25 in Oklahoma City.
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In a July 17 broadcast of The Trent England Show, OCPA’s Trent England (left) and Brandon Dutcher discussed the liberal bias often present in the news pages of the Tulsa World and The Oklahoman. Be sure to listen to The Trent England Show weekday mornings from 7:00 to 9:00 on AM 1640 The Eagle, with the TuneIn app on your phone, or at KZLSAM.com. For more information and exclusive content, sign up for Trent's weekly email at ocpathink.org/tes-email.
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Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, is pictured at OCPA earlier this year. Commenting recently on the Pew survey results on higher education (see page 4), Wood observed that "American higher education, taken all in all, has put itself in opposition to America’s best principles, its most admirable aspirations, its open-mindedness, and its capacity to create a generation of worthy civic and political leaders. That opposition has public consequences, the most important of which is the malformation of students who mistake their anger for clear thinking and who have developed contempt for their country and their countrymen. Anger and contempt will, of course, be met with anger and contempt, and what colleges and universities have provided is a radical intensification of our partisan divide."
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In July, OCPA’s Jonathan Small, Trent England, and Dave Bond attended the annual meeting of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), an organization of state legislators dedicated to the principles of free markets and limited government. When liberal protesters descended upon the meeting, the ALEC Center to Protect Free Speech cheerfully supported the First Amendment rights of the sun-drenched protesters, providing them with water bottles emblazoned with the words “Quenching your thirst for free speech.”
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QUOTE UNQUOTE “13 percent.”
“What disappoints me most is how much is spent on the Regents for Higher
“I love the church, but I love
The percentage of Republicans who say they have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in newspapers, according to a June 2017 Gallup poll
Education. Some of the highest salaries are up around $250,000. A campus
black people more.”
might have 30 employees dealing with diversity issues. Do we need that many? I think there are places where money can be spent a little better.” State Sen. Dewayne Pemberton (R-Muskogee) quoted on July 20 in the Tahlequah Daily Press
“With respect to teachers’ salaries, the major problem is not that they are too low on the “22.” The number of AfricanAmerican senior boys who were college-ready in Tulsa Public Schools in 2015, according to north Tulsa community leader Justin Pickard, quoted in the Tulsa World
Lawrence Ware, co-director of the Center for Africana Studies at Oklahoma State University and the diversity coordinator for OSU’s philosophy department, in a July 17 column in The New York Times titled “Why I’m Leaving the Southern Baptist Convention”
average––––they may well be too high on the average––––but they are too uniform and rigid. Poor teachers are grossly overpaid and good teachers grossly underpaid. Salary schedules tend to be uniform and determined far more by seniority, degrees received, and teaching certificates acquired than by merit.” Nobel-laureate economist Milton Friedman
“I might have to give up my Republican card and join your side of the table.” State Rep. Leslie Osborn (R-Mustang), in an exchange with House Minority Leader Scott Inman (D-Del City) during which she assured him that she would consider any tax-increase proposals he wished to offer. Rep. Osborn is on record saying, “We don’t have a spending problem, we have a revenue problem.”