Perspective - June 2106

JUNE 2016

OKLAHOMA COUNCIL OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS

SUSTAINABILITY:

THE LEFT’S NEW FAÇADE Higher education’s new fundamentalism, “sustainability,” isn’t merely about protecting the environment. It also includes equitable distribution of economic resources and imparting norms in line with “social justice.” Unsurprisingly, University of Oklahoma president David Boren is a leading devotee.

In Case You Missed It Leaders of the Oklahoma Bar Association like our state’s broken judicial-selection system just the way it is.

Thanks to the hard work of OCPA, OCPA Impact, and key lawmakers, many Oklahoma teachers and state employees will now see significant reductions in health care expenses.

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With a new proposal that will incentivize people to decrease work and drop private health care coverage, Oklahoma health care bureaucrats are once again trying to entangle Oklahoma with the Obamacare Medicaid expansion.

Writing at Forbes.com and citing OCPA’s work, George Leef tells the story of how civil asset forfeiture reform was derailed in Oklahoma.

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A private school in Corn, Oklahoma (population: 503) participates in Oklahoma’s voucher program and tax-credit scholarship program.

Former OCPA research assistant Patrick Gibbons discusses a new study which found that school choice generally benefits public schools.

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PERSPECTIVE

Positive Tomorrows is a school dedicated to helping homeless families. A one-minute video shows one reason why enacting Education Savings Accounts is so important.

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In a recent presentation, OCPA trustee Larry Parman, a former Oklahoma Secretary of Commerce, methodically dissected the Boren tax increase.

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On the CBS affiliate in Oklahoma City, journalist Patrick McGuigan discussed a recent presentation at OCPA concerning the alarming growth of non-teaching staff in Oklahoma’s education system.

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Brandon Dutcher, Editor Alex Jones , Art Director

OCPA Trustees

OCPA Researchers

Perspective is published monthly by the

Blake Arnold • Oklahoma City

David McLaughlin • Enid

Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs,

Glenn Ashmore • Oklahoma City

Lew Meibergen • Enid

Inc., an independent public policy

Robert D. Avery • Pawhuska

Ronald L. Mercer • Bethany

Lee J. Baxter • Lawton

Lloyd Noble II • Tulsa

Steve W. Beebe • Duncan

Mike O’Neal • Edmond

John A. Brock • Tulsa

Larry Parman • Oklahoma City

David R. Brown, M.D. • Oklahoma City

Bill Price • Oklahoma City

of free enterprise and limited

David Burrage • Atoka

Patrick T. Rooney • Oklahoma City

government. The views expressed

Michael Carnuccio • Yukon

Melissa Sandefer • Norman

in Perspective are those of the author,

Paul A. Cox • Oklahoma City

Thomas Schroedter • Tulsa

and should not be construed as

William Flanagan • Claremore

Greg Slavonic • Oklahoma City

representing any official position of

Josephine Freede • Oklahoma City

Charles M. Sublett • Tulsa

Ann Felton Gilliland • Oklahoma City

Robert Sullivan • Tulsa

John T. Hanes • Oklahoma City

William E. Warnock, Jr. • Tulsa

John A. Henry III • Oklahoma City

Dana Weber • Tulsa

Henry F. Kane • Bartlesville

Daryl Woodard • Tulsa

Robert Kane • Tulsa

Daniel J. Zaloudek • Tulsa

organization. OCPA formulates and promotes public policy research and analysis consistent with the principles

OCPA or its trustees, researchers, or employees.

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Gene Love • Lawton Tom H. McCasland III • Duncan

Steven J. Anderson, MBA, CPA Research Fellow Tina Dzurisin Research Associate Trent England, J.D. Dr. David and Ann Brown Distinguished Fellow for the Advancement of Liberty Adam Luck, MPP Research Fellow Jayson Lusk, Ph.D. Samuel Roberts Noble Distinguished Fellow J. Scott Moody, M.A. Research Fellow Andrew C. Spiropoulos, J.D. Milton Friedman Distinguished Fellow Wendy P. Warcholik, Ph.D. Research Fellow

CRIMINAL JUSTICE

Another Way to Trim Incarceration Costs

By Brian Maughan

As state policymakers work to reduce prison incarceration rates and their resulting costs, there is a second way to address this issue from the bottom up. Offenders whose crimes do not merit prison time are still clogging county jails across Oklahoma, driving costs at the local level. While legislators and the governor grapple with ways to trim prison populations, we already have a ready-made program in place to begin a similar local effort in our 77 counties.

The prison system is reserved for convicted felons. State leaders have proposed a number of sentencing reforms, including the reclassification of some less serious crimes as misdemeanors. That will have an unintended consequence: additional crowding in county jails, which, in many counties, are already stretched to capacity.

So as we add more misdemeanors to the already lengthy list of offenses that can result in county jail sentences of up to one year, the savings incurred at the state level may not be fully realized, and may in fact be shifted to counties and cities. That’s why it is equally important to address sentencing reform at the local level.

Luckily we already have a proven answer in place. In 2010, I worked closely with Oklahoma County judges, the district attorney, and the public defender to create an innovative new program called SHINE, which stands for Start Helping Impacted Neighborhoods Everywhere.

Under SHINE, judges were encouraged to sentence low-level non-violent offenders to perform a specific number of hours of community service in lieu of jail time. With a daily incarceration cost of about $50, it’s easy to see how sentencing even a minority of offenders to community service would save substantial sums.

From its inception through early April of 2016, SHINE has enrolled 4,751 offenders who have performed more than 244,000 hours of community service. If those 4,751 offenders had each been sentenced to 30 days in jail—a common sentence for offenses at this level—the taxpayers would have shelled out more than $7.1 million to house, feed, and supervise them.

Including personnel to oversee SHINE crews and the equipment they use, it costs about $200,000 per year to operate SHINE. My staff manages the SHINE crews five days a week. One crew is reserved for graffiti eradication, while a second performs assigned jobs like clearing brush, cleaning up public places like parks and school grounds, and even setting up chairs for public events. A third crew works full time to remove red cedar trees from public and private lands, reducing wildfire and drought hazards.

In one case SHINE crews worked for months cleaning up Crystal Lake Park in west Oklahoma City. The park had

degenerated into a place for illegal dumping. SHINE hauled away some 3,400 tires and other debris, and the park is now a center for outdoor youth activities.

Not only does SHINE save jail costs, it also performs work for free that was previously the responsibility of municipalities and local schools. It even has a public safety impact; in several cases

An innovative new alternative-sentencing program helps offenders and taxpayers alike. we were able to clean up hobo camps that had become sites for drug sales and prostitution.

SHINE has advantages for offenders and the taxpayers alike.

Offenders sentenced to SHINE can arrange their hours flexibly, in many cases allowing them to maintain their jobs and family connections. And since they are not jail inmates, the county is not responsible for any medical care they might require.

Finally, many SHINE inmates have responded favorably to the program, noting that honest outdoor labor was far better than simply sitting in a crowded jail.

Since its creation SHINE has been expanded to allow family court judges to sentence deadbeat parents who are in arrears on child support to SHINE for a limited number of days each week until they provide proof of employment and the intention to meet their parental obligations. Other legislation permits judges to assess fines in many cases that will go directly to supporting the minimal SHINE operational costs.

Unfortunately, as successful as it has been in many ways, SHINE remains underutilized. We could have a strong alternative sentencing program under way in all 77 counties by now. And as state officials ratchet a number of former felony offenses down to misdemeanors, we’re going to need such programs at the local level even more.

Brian Maughan is a county commissioner in Oklahoma County.

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TAX AND FISCAL

Oklahoma’s Budget Hole Could Be Much Deeper

By Brandon Dutcher

Oklahoma’s budget crunch has been much in the news lately.

But imagine how much worse the situation could be.

“Oklahoma has about 692,000 students in public schools,” says Shawn Hime, executive director of the Oklahoma State School Boards Association. “According to the U.S. Census and data from the National Center for Education Statistics, more than 100,000 students are educated outside of the public school system.”

Imagine if 100,000 new students showed up at their local public school tomorrow morning (“I’m here for my free education, please!”). If our elected officials (federal, state, and local) wanted to keep per-pupil spending at its current level, they would have to come up with another billion dollars annually, based on numbers from the Oklahoma Cost Accounting System (see facing page).

One of our policymakers’ chief priorities is public education, i.e., making sure we have an educated public. Fortunately, it doesn’t matter where that education takes place.

Some of it takes place in public schools, for which our political leaders are spending some $10,000 per student (according to the Oklahoma State Department of Education’s own numbers referenced above).

Some of it takes place outside of the public school system—in homeschools, for example, or in accredited private schools, where the median tuition is $5,310, according to the Oklahoma Private School Accreditation Commission. According to PrivateSchoolReview.com, the average private school tuition in Oklahoma is $4,683 for elementary schools and $7,023 for high schools. Cash-squeezed appropriators should be grateful for these thousands of parents who are picking up the tab themselves.

Indeed, politicians should try to save even more money (and reduce school overcrowding) by redirecting some of those 692,000 students into the nonpublic sector.

Many parents would jump at the chance. In the last two years, three different scientific surveys (Braun, SoonerPoll, and Cole Hargrave Snodgrass) have asked Oklahomans what type of school they would prefer for their children. Each time, many respondents (48 percent, 50 percent, and 30 percent) said they would choose a nonpublic alternative.

Policymakers should try to bridge the gap between actual enrollment and what parents want. A $5,000 voucher, tax credit, or education savings account, for example—even if it didn’t

cover the full tuition amount—would spur some of those 692,000 to choose alternatives outside of the public school system. (As for the 100,000 already outside the system, sorry, I’m afraid in this budget climate that would be too tall an order.)

Redirecting some of those 692,000 students would have a positive fiscal impact on the public school system, but that’s a subject for another day. What’s important here is that it would have a positive fiscal impact on taxpayers and their elected leaders—leaders who are trying each year to build roads and bridges, fund mental health programs, incarcerate criminals, increase teacher pay, and much more.

This positive impact on taxpayers—now paying $5K instead of $10K, in my example above—is obvious enough. We already see the principle at work with Oklahoma’s higher education vouchers.

For example, the Oklahoma Tuition Equalization Grant (OTEG)—which is nearly identical in structure to Oklahoma’s privateschool voucher program in common education (the Lindsey Nicole Henry Scholarship)—is a modest $2,000 grant for students enrolling in private colleges. Created with strong bipartisan support in 2003, OTEG has saved taxpayers more than $50 million, according to Oklahoma Independent Colleges and Universities.

For another analysis of how school choice would save money for Oklahoma taxpayers, go to bit.ly/1pFwErK. Dr. Greg Forster, author of a research synthesis of the schoolchoice literature, says that out of 28 empirical studies, 25 find that school choice saves money for taxpayers and three are neutral. No empirical study has ever found that school choice has a negative fiscal effect on taxpayers.

In sum, policymakers staring at Oklahoma’s budget hole should (1) thank the parents of 100,000 students that the hole’s not a lot deeper, and (2) try to entice some of the parents of 692,000 students to help fill that hole.

State policymakers should try to bridge the gap between actual public-school enrollment and what parents want.

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PERSPECTIVE // June 2016

Brandon Dutcher is senior vice president at OCPA. 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 award-winning 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.

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Prepared by OCPA research fellow Steve Anderson (stevea@aracpas.com), March 9, 2016

****Oklahoma State Department of Education, Oklahoma Cost Accounting System (OCAS), "State Expenditure Details Based On All Funds Submitted by Districts," Reporting Year 2014-­‐15, https://sdeweb01.sde.ok.gov/OCAS_Reporting/StateExpenditureDetails.aspx

***Based on 22 students per classroom

**Oklahoma State School Boards Association, http://bit.ly/24BDOxx

*Numbers compiled from Oklahoma State Department of Education, Oklahoma Cost Accounting System (OCAS), "State Expenditure Details Based On All Funds Submitted by Districts," Reporting Year 2014-­‐15, https://sdeweb01.sde.ok.gov/OCAS_Reporting/StateExpenditureDetails.aspx

Students Educated Outside of the Public School System** New Teachers Necessary if Students Educated Outside of the System Were to Enroll in Public School*** Public School Enrollment **** Public School Average Daily Attendance**** 4,545 691,841 644,035

100,000

9,592.82

$

25.06

29.96

29.67

0.58 384.08 356.89

$ 6,636,713,732.34

$ 17,337,802.68

$ 20,726,092.96

$ 20,529,707.95

$ 401,764.62 $ 265,719,716.00

$ 246,908,244.63

Facilities Acquisition & Construction 4200 Land Acquisition 4300 Land Improvement 4400 Architecture & Engineering 4500 Educational Specifications 4600 Building Acquisition & Construction 4700 Building Improvement

487.80 82.33

30.18

821.00 87.54

$ 337,479,520.79

$ 56,961,995.48

$ 20,876,886.10

Operation of Non-­‐Instructional 3100 Food Services 3200 Enterprise Operations 3300 Community Services

545.29 307.86 238.04 442.26 341.91 900.53 316.54

4,165.30

Public School Per Pupil Expenditure by Function (Using Enrollment)

568,004,160.94 60,565,740.39

$ 377,254,509.85

$ 212,989,876.78

$ 164,689,068.66

$ 305,972,355.70

$ 236,548,349.52

$ 623,026,033.12

$ 218,997,159.87

Support Services 2100 Support Services -­‐ Students 2200 Instructional Staff 2300 General Administration 2400 School Administration 2500 Business 2600 Operations & Maintenance 2700 Student Transportation

Other Outlays 5100 Debt Service 5200 Reimbursement Total

$ 2,881,724,746.30

Instruction 1000 Instruction

Public School Expenditure by Function

$

10,304.92

881.95 94.04

26.92 32.18 31.88 0.62 412.59 383.38

524.01 88.45 32.42

585.77 330.71 255.71 475.09 367.29 967.38 340.04

4,474.49

Public School Per Pupil Expenditure by Function (Using Average Daily Attendance)

$

$ $

$ $ $ $ $ $

$ $ $

$ $ $ $ $ $ $

$

959,283,091.37

82,100,390.25 8,754,286.08

2,506,038.62 2,995,788.48 2,967,402.62 58,071.81 38,407,627.76 35,688,582.29

48,779,924.98 8,233,394.01 3,017,584.40

54,529,076.75 30,785,957.58 23,804,467.88 44,225,820.05 34,191,143.56 90,053,355.20 31,654,261.58

416,529,917.47

$

$ $

$ $ $ $ $ $

$ $ $

$ $ $ $ $ $ $

$

1,030,489,893.75

88,194,635.34

9,404,109.61

2,692,059.83 3,218,163.42 3,187,670.50 62,382.44

41,258,594.68

38,337,716.68

52,400,819.07

8,844,552.14 3,241,577.23

58,576,725.69

33,071,174.13

25,571,454.14

47,508,666.64

36,729,124.29

96,737,942.39

34,003,931.63

447,448,593.90

Savings to the State from Students Savings to the State from Students Educated Outside of the Public Educated Outside of the Public School School System (Using Enrollment) System (Using Average Daily Attendance)

Savings from Oklahoma Students Educated Outside of the Public School System*

SCHOOL CHOICE

Why Are School Choice Opponents Afraid of the Facts?

By Greg Forster

Oklahoma has embraced the national revolution of educational choice—it’s one of 30 states with private school choice programs. As the state has now moved to embrace the best kind of school choice, Education Savings Accounts, government unions and their allies have howled all the louder that choice is awful. But if that’s so, why do they have to keep running away from the facts? What are they afraid of?

On a shrieking, hysterical webpage titled “#ESAIsNotOK,” the Oklahoma Education Coalition (OEC) repeats a large number of long-discredited myths about school choice. Let’s zero in on what is probably the most important one: Vouchers are UNPROVEN as a means of consistently or significantly improving student achievement for all students…Research on voucher programs in other states shows vouchers have been costly but offers no confidence that vouchers will improve achievement among participating students.

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PERSPECTIVE // June 2016

I’ve reviewed all the existing empirical research on school choice programs—no cherry-picking, no exceptions. Here’s what it finds.

Far from being “costly,” school choice saves taxpayer money and also has a positive fiscal effect on school budgets—especially when it uses a voucher or ESA structure. When a student leaves, the public school loses all the expenses associated with that student but not all the revenue, because of the convoluted way we fund public schools. Twenty-eight empirical studies have examined school choice’s fiscal impact on taxpayers and public schools; of these, 25 find that school choice programs save money, and three find that the programs they study are revenue neutral. No empirical study has found a negative fiscal impact.

Since the programs save money rather than costing money, both for taxpayers and for public school budgets, they need not produce enormous academic benefits to be worth adopting.

Even modest gains are great if you can get them for free—or, in this case, better than free.

I’ve reviewed all the existing empirical research on school choice programs—no cherry-picking, no exceptions. School choice saves taxpayer money, improves academic outcomes for school choice participants, and also improves academic outcomes for students who remain in the public schools.

Eighteen studies have examined academic outcomes for school choice participants using random assignment, the gold standard of social science. Of these, 14 find choice improves student outcomes: six find that all students benefit and eight find that some benefit and some are not visibly affected. Two studies find no visible impact, and two studies find that Louisiana’s program—where most of the eligible private schools were scared away from the program by arbitrary intimidation from federal and state agencies—had a negative impact.

More important than its impact on participating students, however, is its impact on the much larger number of students who remain in public schools. Thirty empirical studies (including all methods) have examined school choice’s impact on academic outcomes in public schools. Of these, 28 find that choice improved public schools, one finds no visible impact, and one finds a negative impact.

Now, let’s be clear. There’s a lot more to education than test scores. Unlike our would-be master-of-the-universe professional expert class, whose technocratic ambitions have so far managed to do little more than run us further down into the ditch we’re already in, most parents don’t give test scores overriding priority. They have a holistic understanding of what it means to be educated. That’s one reason we should trust parents, not our all-thumbs, foot-shooting class of technocrats, to control education. But test scores and other formal academic outcomes (like graduation rates) do matter, and the research favors school choice on these outcomes.

In case you’re wondering about the terminology, the OEC webpage insists for some reason that we must refer to ESAs as “vouchers.” Their arguments are so bankrupt on the merits that their only hope of persuading people to reject ESAs is by changing the label to something they think has negative emotional associations. Fortunately, the word “vouchers” has never really been a liability for the school choice movement.

Moreover, people do tend to notice which side is making a real argument and which is focused on manipulating emotions— even when the latter makes some effort to hide its reliance on manipulative tactics, which OEC does not.

But that’s not the worst of it. At least OEC sticks to the triedand-true, focus-group-tested myths cooked up by professional opponents of choice. Other, less polished voices reveal the darker side of the anti-choice coalition.

Oklahoma edu-blogger Rob Miller at least resembles OEC in that he uses boldface to indicate where the key departures from reality occur. Other than that, he sinks to a much lower level: Ask yourself how a voucher for private school is going to help a child with two siblings living in government housing, with a single parent working two jobs, in a

crime-filled neighborhood of Tulsa or Oklahoma City?

The reality is that it will not.

Why not? Because, Miller says, only rich parents care enough about their kids to take advantage of school choice programs.

Poor parents are shiftless and lazy, and will therefore leave their kids to wither in public schools when they could get a better education in private schools.

No, really, here’s his actual argument: Those children blessed with engaged and motivated parents will take their public tax dollars to whatever education venue they choose. The exodus of privileged children from the public school system, particularly in urban areas, will exacerbate the growing gap between the haves and have-nots, and restore an era of separate and unequal schools which will do irreparable harm to our nation.

Yikes. Martin Luther King, call your office.

There are now 61 school choice programs in 30 states plus Washington, D.C. They serve about 400,000 students. You know who those students are? Disproportionately, they’re the underprivileged kids whose parents are allegedly too shiftless and lazy to use school choice.

Now, it’s certainly true that some parents are more engaged in their children’s education than others. And, uncomfortable as this reality is, there does appear to be some degree of relationship between parental engagement in children’s education and socioeconomic status.

But “some degree of relationship” doesn’t mean rich parents love their kids and poor parents don’t. To blow this up into some kind of Eloi-and-Morlocks nightmare out of H.G. Wells is outrageous.

There you have the two main flavors of school choice myths in a nutshell: misrepresentation of data and hard facts, offered up by incompetent technocrats; and wild tales of the depraved evils of parents and schools, offered up by resentful bigots. No wonder they’re afraid of the facts.

Greg Forster (Ph.D., Yale University) is a senior fellow with the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice. He is the author of six books, including John Locke’s Politics of Moral Consensus (Cambridge University Press, 2005) and Joy for the World: How Christianity Lost Its Cultural Influence and Can Begin Rebuilding It (Crossway Books, 2014). He has written numerous articles in peer-reviewed academic journals, as well as in popular publications such as the Washington Post and the Chronicle of Higher Education.

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HEALTHCARE

Obamacare Medicaid Expansion Creates Expensive New Entitlement for Able-Bodied Adults While Endangering the Truly Needy

By Jonathan Ingram and Jonathan Small

The Oklahoma Health Care Authority has proposed a plan to “rebalance” Medicaid eligibility in the Sooner State. But this “rebalancing” is really just an Obamacare expansion by another name.

The plan has three major components: (1) increasing taxes to raise reimbursement rates for traditional Medicaid, (2) shifting higher-income enrollees out of Medicaid in 2019, and (3) expanding Medicaid eligibility to a new class of able-bodied adults under Obamacare.

But the first two components have nothing to do with Obamacare expansion. Oklahoma policymakers can raise reimbursement rates and shift higher-income enrollees out of Medicaid even without expanding Obamacare.

Policymakers should be aware that in every other state that has finally expanded Medicaid and accessed Obamacare Medicaid dollars, the final agreement that binds future lawmakers is always a significantly watered down version of the initial promises proposed. What actually is adopted looks a lot more like what the Obama administration wants than what the respective state initially proposed.

A New Entitlement for Able-Bodied Adults

Medicaid expansion would be a bad deal for Oklahoma.

Thousands of kids and adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities are sitting on Medicaid waiting lists in Oklahoma. That list is now at an all-time high, with individuals waiting an average of nearly 10 years to get the services they need.

But these aren’t the people who can expect help under OHCA’s “rebalancing” plan. The plan would create a new entitlement for hundreds of thousands of able-bodied adults, moving them to the front of the line while those on waiting lists get pushed even further to the back.

These newly-eligible adults are in their prime working years, largely have no dependent children, and have no disabilities keeping them from gainful employment. To make matters worse, more than half of new enrollees could be shifted into Medicaid and out of private insurance, according to data from

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PERSPECTIVE // June 2016

the Lewin Group Health Benefits Simulation Model. This means that most of the new able-bodied adults who could be added to Medicaid under the planned expansion will come not from the ranks of the uninsured, but from employer-sponsored coverage, from the individual market, or from the Obamacare exchange.

Such results aren’t conjecture; the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that 2 million people would leave the workforce if Medicaid expansion were fully implemented.

Although OHCA currently predicts that just 175,000 ablebodied adults would enroll in Medicaid expansion, its own consultants estimated that expansion would make as many as 628,000 able-bodied adults newly eligible for Medicaid. And if that weren’t bad enough, the experiences of other expansion states suggests enrollment—and ultimately costs—will soar far higher.

In states with available data, actual expansion enrollment surpassed initial projections by a whopping 91 percent. Worse yet, these states have blown past their projected maximum enrollment by an average of 73 percent. In many states, more able-bodied adults have been enrolled in Medicaid than states thought would ever even be eligible.

This has led to significant cost overruns in state after state.

Ohio’s Medicaid expansion, for example, has already run $3.1 billion over budget and is expected to run a whopping $8 billion over budget by the end of 2017. In Kentucky, costs exceeded projections by $1.8 billion in just the first 18 months of operation.

And in Illinois, Medicaid expansion has run roughly $1 billion over budget each and every year.

By adopting OHCA’s proposal, Oklahoma policymakers would be inviting further perpetual budget overruns and fiscal uncertainty. But worst of all, it would ultimately mean fewer dollars available for those who need them most.

Oklahoma Should Continue to Reject Obamacare, Pursue Better Reforms

If policymakers wish to increase reimbursement rates or shift higher-income enrollees out of Medicaid, they can do so without expanding Obamacare whatsoever. In fact, expanding Medicaid under Obamacare will make any other Medicaid reforms even

harder to achieve.

The OHCA has consistently fought efforts by policymakers to better manage and coordinate the care of the current Medicaid population. It has fought efforts to implement enrollment integrity audits to fight abuse of the program by enrollees. In fact, OHCA employees have bragged to other states’ Medicaid staff about killing previous efforts by lawmakers to implement the use of private plans in the current Medicaid program.

Numerous options are available to lawmakers to improve the current Medicaid program without repeating the mistakes of the past and expanding Medicaid as suggested by the OHCA. These options include:

• • •

•

•

Decouple and adjust the various provider rates so that critical services like nursing home care, rural primary care, and rural hospital care can be preserved.

Implement the Medicaid reform pilot program which was passed by the legislature in 2015 and which special interests tried to repeal during the 2016 legislative session.

Further expand Medicaid reform efforts to other populations currently enrolled in Medicaid. Further coordination of care, use of private plans to better manage care, and increased provider managed care and capitation will save more than $80 million, based on other states’ experiences.

Create a state- and locally funded stabilization fund to reimburse the actual dollar shortfall for rural hospitals or nursing homes. Funding options include TSET, savings from elimination of enrollee fraud and abuse, and savings from Medicaid reform efforts.

Implement a significant effort to audit Medicaid rolls to ensure that only those actually eligible are enrolled.

•

Educate the public about abuses of the program by people who drop private coverage to enroll in the program because of the incentives of the free entitlement.

The state of Illinois saved more than $1 billion by implementation of this reform in its Medicaid program.

Local communities should increase local support and local financing of health providers that are struggling.

Oklahoma policymakers have repeatedly rejected attempts to expand Obamacare in the Sooner State. Nothing in OHCA’s plan gives lawmakers a reason to change direction.

Expanding Obamacare would put the truly needy in danger and usher in further perpetual budget crises. Oklahoma lawmakers should implement reforms to make the existing Medicaid program work, not increase government-subsidized health care dependence.

Jonathan Ingram (J.D., Southern Illinois University) is vice president of research at the Foundation for Government Accountability. He previously served as a staff writer and editor-in-chief for the Journal of Legal Medicine, an internationally ranked peer-reviewed academic journal.

Jonathan Small, CPA, serves as OCPA’s president. Previously, he 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. He holds a B.A. in Accounting from the University of Central Oklahoma and is a Certified Public Accountant.

OKLAHOMA HEALTH CARE AUTHORITY’S LATEST PLAN IS SIMPLY OBAMACARE MEDICAID EXPANSION

BY ANOTHER NAME 9

Sustainability: The Left’s New Façade

By Rachelle Peterson

he Sooner State suffers less from eco-apocalypticism than most, but it isn’t immune to environmental groupthink.

Look no further than the college campus, where ill-conceived ideologies flourish under the innocentsounding label of “sustainability.”

At the University of Oklahoma, the student government has created a “student sustainability department” with deputized ambassadors responsible to “spread environmental awareness.”

Every year these sustainability czars hold an annual “Green Week,” during which they shame their peers into signing the “Crimson and Green Pledge” to live a more sustainable life. Tips include such energy-squeezing actions as switching unused computers into “sleep mode” rather than “screen saver” because “screen savers DO NOT save energy,” shunning energy-sucking space heaters, and setting thermostats to 75 degrees in the summer and 68 in the winter.

No carbon footprint is too small to shrink further, so the student group OUr Earth (playing off the university’s

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PERSPECTIVE // June 2016

abbreviation) recommends various forms of environmental penance. No smokers should use lighters, OUr Earth admonishes: too much plastic. Much better to strike matches.

Likewise no self-respecting climate citizen should drink water from disposable bottles, which can take “thousands of years” to decompose. Students should also line-dry their clothes and eat at least one vegetarian meal each week. Carnivores ought to be ashamed, according to the group, because producing a pound of beef requires the astonishing waste of “2,500 gallons of water,” along with the destruction of “55 square feet of rainforest.” How many of America’s cattle are raised in rainforests is a question left unanswered.

These gestures of environmental care won’t do anything, of course, to protect the Ozarks or curb pollution in the Red River.

Will giving up plastic lighters really save much trash or trim tons of carbon dioxide emissions? These small steps toward “sustainability” more closely resemble the genuflections of a radical devotee than the rational plans of a pragmatist.

Rena Schild / Shutterstock.com

In 2007 David Boren signed the American College and University Presidents’ Climate Commitment, a pledge that requires the university to eliminate 100 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions and to “take immediate steps” toward “integrating sustainability into the curriculum.”

We know these aren’t the unauthorized antics of activist students, though, because president David Boren started the university’s sustaina-myopia. In 2007 he signed the American College and University Presidents’ Climate Commitment, a pledge that requires the university to eliminate 100 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions and to “take immediate steps” toward “integrating sustainability into the curriculum.”

Nearly 650 college and university presidents have signed up for this roster of sustainability programs, but Boren took the lead as one of the first “charter signatories.” When he announced this new commitment, Boren characterized it as part of “our patriotic duty as Americans.”

Boren established an “Office of Sustainability” and an “Environmental Concerns and Sustainability Committee,” and added B.S. and B.A. degrees in sustainability, along with a sustainability minor. Already OU has cut its greenhouse gas emissions by more than half and shifted two-thirds of its energy supply to renewable sources. In its quest to achieve “zero-waste” status, the university even shelved the dining trays, which required water to wash and enabled students to take too much food. The curriculum, too, has undergone a thorough greening. There are now several dozen sustainability-focused courses, including offerings such as “Gender & Environment” or “Population and Society.”

Sustainability has grown into one of the leading ideologies shaping today’s college campuses—and a generation of new voters. But what is “sustainability”?

To most it’s simply the newest word for “environmentalism” or even “thriftiness,” but that’s not quite right. The University of Oklahoma’s Environmental Sustainability degree program offers a definition: Environmental sustainability studies how human societies can meet the needs of the present

without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs. Achieving this goal requires balancing short- and long-term needs related to jobs and economic growth, societal well-being, and environmental health.

That’s lifted almost verbatim from Our Common Future, the 1987 UN document better known as the “Brundtland Report,” named for Norway’s socialist prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, who chaired the committee on “sustainable development.” Sustainability presumes that everything is a zero-sum game, that using resources now necessarily means running out of them in the future. It ignores the human capacity for ingenuity and emphasizes worst-case scenarios.

Sustainability measures those worstcase scenarios according to something called the “triple bottom line,” which includes the environment, the economy, and society. (You can see it peeking out of the second sentence of OU’s definition.)

Sometimes this is illustrated as a Venn diagram of three interlocking circles, with “sustainability” occupying the sweet spot in the middle where all three overlap. In this view, “sustainability” cannot simply involve protecting the environment.

It must include equitable distribution of economic resources, as well as the imparting of mores and norms in line with “social justice.”

Sustainability leapt from the pages of a UN report into American culture by way of the college campus. It did so through the American College and University Presidents’ Climate Commitment, the same commitment David Boren was among the first to sign. John Kerry and Teresa Heinz absorbed the sustainability message at the UN Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992 and came back determined to promote sustainability in the U.S. The next year they founded the nonprofit Second Nature to target college campuses as the likeliest incubators of sustainability. In 2006, Second Nature launched the Presidents’ Climate

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Championing fossil-fuel divestment builds habits. It nudges students toward green conscientiousness and sets voting patterns and purchasing priorities during impressionable college years.

Commitment.

Since then the sustainability movement has expanded exponentially. Besides the Presidents’ Climate Commitment (which Don Betz, president of the University of Central Oklahoma, has also signed) the sustainability movement has spawned the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE), a group with more than 900 university members, including Oklahoma State University and the University of Oklahoma. According to AASHE, nearly 500 colleges and universities offer 1,386 sustainability-related degree programs and hire nearly 500 sustainability staff.

AASHE members may submit extensive reports on their sustainability endeavors and earn bronze, silver, and gold rankings. Oklahoma State University-Stillwater earned a silver ranking for actions such as adding sustainability instruction into new student orientation, sprinkling sustainability courses throughout 37 different academic departments, having a Diversity Advisory Board and a Women’s Program to support gender diversity, and offering support to low-income students.

This is the “triple bottom line” at work.

Students have taken their sustainability training to heart with a zealotry that eclipses that of their sustainability instructors.

The latest example is the fossil fuel divestment movement, a student-run campaign at 1,000 universities asking their institutions to sell off endowment investments in coal, oil, and gas. (Both Oklahoma State University and the University of Oklahoma have campaigns.) The students claim such investments are “unconscionable” and promote the undue influence of oil barons in politics. They got that message from Middlebury College professor and national icon Bill McKibben, the founder of the international activist group 350.org, which sparked the divestment movement. McKibben, one of the highest-profile high priests of sustainability, says oil companies are “Public Enemy Number One to the survival of our planetary civilization.”

McKibben and his student followers are, on the whole, too radical for all but the very greenest of the college presidents— though McKibben did deliver the McBride Lecture on Faith and Literature at Oklahoma Christian University in 2008, a few years before divestment took off. Fewer than 40 American colleges and universities have agreed to follow McKibben’s divestment plan, and most of those opted for a severely curtailed version of divestment. No Oklahoma university has agreed to divestment, and David Boren has acknowledged the oil industry’s importance to Oklahoma’s economy. But cutting campus investments in fossil fuels was never really the goal, according to McKibben. Championing divestment—like forgoing cafeteria trays or fastidiously choosing matches over lighters—builds

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PERSPECTIVE // June 2016

habits. It nudges students toward green conscientiousness and sets voting patterns and purchasing priorities during impressionable college years.

When students speak, politicians listen. Green regimes on campus build voting blocs in public. Since McKibben launched divestment, California has enacted a law divesting public pensions from coal companies, and Vermont and New York, along with New York City itself, have taken up similar bills.

State attorneys general, eager for a press buzz, have jumped in, too. AGs in New York, California, Massachusetts, and the U.S. Virgin Islands have launched a witch-hunt investigation into ExxonMobil on the McKibben-endorsed allegations that the company lied to the public about global warming. Another 13 attorneys general have announced themselves ready to take up the investigation as well, and the Virgin Islands AG has gone the extra mile to subpoena think tanks that express skepticism of anthropogenic global warming and that at some point in their histories received funding from ExxonMobil. Scott Pruitt, Oklahoma’s attorney general, has shown admirable pluck in announcing along with his Alabaman counterpart Luther Strange that they believe scientific debates should remain open, rather than “silenced with threats of criminal prosecution.”

Pruitt and Strange deserve hearty praise for their courage, but alas, the sustainability juggernaut moves on.

Already Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell has satisfied part of McKibben’s anti-fossil-fuels demands, when in January she announced a moratorium on new coal mining leases on public lands. Senators Bernie Sanders and Jeff Merkley (D-OR) have sponsored federal legislation named for one of McKibben’s slogans, the “Keep It in the Ground Act,” which would prohibit new leases for extracting fossil fuels from public lands. McKibben, who has endorsed Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign and stumped for his fellow Vermonter, is in no small part responsible for Sanders’ surge in popularity among the youngest voters. Of course it’s also the case that Sanders is a proud Democratic socialist, and Millennials favor socialism by a wider margin than any other demographic. But socialism fits nicely with sustainability’s triple bottom line, and at times it’s hard to tell where the one ends and the other begins.

Citizens should take note—or else our constitutional republic may not find itself sustainable.

Rachelle Peterson is director of research projects at the National Association of Scholars. She is the author of Inside Divestment: The Illiberal Movement to Turn a Generation Against Fossil Fuels and co-author of Sustainability: Higher Education’s New Fundamentalism.

QUICK HITS

An Oklahoma Version of Obama’s Health Care Plan I can’t blame the leaders of the Oklahoma Health Care Authority for trying to convince state policymakers to pocket the federal dollars President Barack Obama is offering to any state that agrees to expand its Medicaid program. But I do blame them for refusing to admit that their plan will enmesh the state in the president’s health care scheme.

Now, the OHCA denies they want to expand Medicaid. They argue we’re expanding a program, Insure Oklahoma, which predates the president’s health care scheme. In fact, they would say, in addition to providing subsidized insurance coverage to 175,000 additional people, we plan to take a group of people off Medicaid and put them in Insure Oklahoma. Instead of staying on Medicaid, they’ll get a subsidy, based on income, to buy private insurance.

This argument sounds persuasive if you don’t know the important differences between the president’s scheme and Insure Oklahoma. In the most decisive respects, if we go along with the OHCA plan, Insure Oklahoma will no longer exist—it will just be folded into the president’s failing health care scheme. No matter the name, it will be the Oklahoma version of Obama’s plan. …

The OHCA tells us not to worry—the feds will pay for $900 million out of the $1 billion their plan will cost. But, as the association’s report shows, in states that implemented the federal scheme, actual costs far exceeded original estimates. Today’s policymakers won’t be around to witness what happened to the seeds they intend to sow—but our children will reap the whirlwind.

—Andrew Spiropoulos, OCPA’s Milton Friedman Distinguished Fellow, writing April 7 in The Journal Record. To read the entire article, go to ocpa.us/OHCA_Medicaid.

Oklahoma Tax Hikes Are Unwise What Oklahomans ought to be most concerned about is that we are on the precipice of a state recession. Many are surprised that, despite the loss of thousands of energy and related manufacturing jobs, our economy so far has held steady, even adding jobs in the other sectors.

Well, conservative legislators shouldn’t be confused about why the economy has remained vibrant—it’s their policies that are responsible for its resilience. Over the last decade, conservatives worked hard to remove the obstacles to economic growth that held us back for decades. They reformed a legal system that benefited lawyers at the expense of jobs and economic growth. Instead of spending all the oil money on government, they cut taxes so that the money could be invested in the private economy, producing a virtuous circle of more jobs and more capital for investment. Instead of jumping into the Medicaid expansion tar pit, conservatives had the courage to face down greedy health providers and say no to a bad deal.

And now, in the midst of an energy industry collapse that has delivered sharp blows to our economy, the education establishment demands massive tax increases so we can increase education spending even more. The hospitals want us to raise taxes to pay the state share of the federal health care scheme, so they can feed at the trough of federal dollars. …

Let’s make it clear that we will not allow bureaucrats to throw this economy into recession by raising taxes. Sensible people know that it is economic suicide to raise taxes in our circumstances. It should be political suicide as well.

—Andrew Spiropoulos, OCPA’s Milton Friedman Distinguished Fellow, writing April 21 in The Journal Record. To read the entire article, go to ocpa.us/TaxHikesUnwise.

Your Money. Your School.

Your Choice.

The Opportunity Scholarship Fund gives you the ability to help students attend accredited private schools in Oklahoma at little or no cost to you.

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QUICK HITS

The $7,000 Teacher Pay Raise University of Oklahoma President David Boren is promoting a sales tax increase to finance a $5,000 pay raise for all teachers and $125 million for higher education.

Did you know a larger raise could have been given without tax hikes? We could have already given every public school teacher in Oklahoma a $7,042 raise if we had simply increased our non-teaching staff growth at the same rate as our student enrollment growth.

Those are the findings of a study by Dr. Benjamin Scafidi, an economist whose specialty is school finance. Using the data that the Oklahoma State Department of Education reports to the U.S. Department of Education, here’s what he found: Between fiscal years 1993 and 2014, enrollment in Oklahoma public schools increased by 14 percent. The number of teachers rose by a comparable 13 percent. But non-teaching school staffs soared a dramatic 34 percent. … “Clearly,” Scafidi said, “there is a priority in public education for hiring people outside the classroom.”

—OCPA president Jonathan Small, writing April 1 in The Journal Record.

To read the entire article, go to ocpa.us/TeacherPayRaise.

Liberalism’s Echo Chamber A defining story of this legislative session is a powerful opponent of education savings accounts (ESAs), the Tulsa Regional Chamber of Commerce.

Remember the Tulsa Regional Chamber? Its leadership in 2014 participated in a failed attempt to support U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu, who was trying to prevent Republicans from gaining the majority in the U.S. Senate. Imagine if some of the leadership of the Tulsa Regional Chamber had succeeded. Sen. Harry Reid would still be the Senate majority leader. Majority Leader Reid likely would be using the “nuclear option” to ramrod through an extremely left-of-center Supreme Court justice nomination to replace Justice Antonin Scalia.

Once again the Tulsa Regional Chamber is in lock-step with the Obama administration. Obama’s administration tried to stifle a very popular school choice program in Louisiana and Washington, D.C. … In fairness, the Tulsa Regional Chamber is consistent.

The chamber parrots the funding requests of state agencies, proffers the Medicaid expansion as one of the best economic deals ever offered the state, and tries to kill tax relief for all while working for special-interest tax breaks. The chamber even tried to cripple the oil-and-gas industry with exorbitantly high taxes just before the downturn.

—OCPA president Jonathan Small, writing March 18 in The Journal Record.

To read the entire article, go to ocpa.us/Echo_Chamber.

White Privilege?

If you’re white you shouldn’t sing a Rihanna song. That’s what a white student in a human relations theory class at the University of Oklahoma was told during a recent lesson on “privilege” and “microaggressions.”

“I was told as a white woman it’s insulting and a microaggression for me to cover or sing a Rihanna song because I’m not from Barbados,” the student told Todd Starnes of FoxNews.com. “They teach you that if you are not part of the minority you cannot be discriminated against,” she said. “A black person cannot be racist to a white person.”

The History of Science Department has conducted training in which students were taught it’s a racist microaggression to use the phrase, “If you work hard enough, you will succeed.”

OU’s mandatory “diversity training” for new students includes a discussion of white privilege and implicit bias. President David Boren has asked each dean to hire a “diversity and inclusion” officer.

OU also recently agreed to pay $40,000 for a performance by a black hip-hop artist who disseminates the “n” word.

—OCPA president Jonathan Small, writing April 22 in The Journal Record.

To read the entire article, go to ocpa.us/OUWhitePrivilege.

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PERSPECTIVE // June 2016

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@OCPAthink 1. OCPA’s Estela Hernandez was the keynote speaker at the “Exceptional Women’s Brunch” on March 24 in Edmond. The event is hosted by the University of Central Oklahoma Women’s Outreach Center.

2. OCPA’s Trent England (left) interviews Ed Allen in the broadcast studio at OCPA. Mr. Allen is president of the Oklahoma City AFT (American Federation of Teachers) Local 2309. Listen to Trent weekday mornings from 7:00 to 10:00 on AM 1640 The Eagle or online at ocpa.us/MGradio.

3. Dr. Matthew Ladner, senior advisor of policy and research for the Foundation for Excellence in Education, discussed “The Storm on the Oklahoma Horizon” in a recent presentation at OCPA. Significant demographic changes are coming to Oklahoma, Dr. Ladner said. With Oklahoma’s student population becoming increasingly diverse even as the state’s total population begins to age profoundly, our political leaders—already facing budget strains related to health care, education, and more—are going to see those challenges exacerbated. To view Dr. Ladner’s presentation, go to ocpa.us/Ladner.

4. OCPA’s Estela Hernandez was the keynote speaker at an event launching a local chapter of “Propel Women,” a new organization in Duncan.

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QUOTE UNQUOTE “Our most urgent task is to end the divisions in our country, to stop the political bickering, and to unite our talents and efforts. Americans of all persuasions are pleading with our political leaders to bring us together. I believe Senator Obama is sincerely committed to that effort. He has made a non-partisan approach to all issues a top priority.”

OU president David Boren, endorsing Barack Obama for president, April 18, 2008

“Keeping children in a failing school is no acceptable option. Give them their money and

“This year we’ll fund at $8.2 billion, the most ever in state history when you look at federal funds, local property tax dollars, and all the ways the state funds schools.”

House Speaker Jeff Hickman, pointing out that Oklahoma education funding is at an all-time high

let them go.”

Daniel Keating, a member of the state Board of Education, touting private-school choice in a column in the Tulsa Beacon

“Every time they [NY, CT, PA, etc.] raise taxes, it’s basically a gift to Florida. More and more people are buying homes here and we get richer.

“6%” The percentage of people who say they trust the media, according to an April 18 story from the Associated Press

It’s just incredible to me that these liberals keep pretending that taxes don’t matter.”

Florida Gov. Rick Scott

“On $20 bill, Ds replace Andrew Jackson, a founding father of D Party, w Harriet Tubman, a black, gun-toting, evangelical Christian, R woman.”

John Lott, in a Twitter post after the announcement that Harriet Tubman will soon grace the $20 bill