Quotes of the Day

States can … use their resources in a zero-sum battle with each other to provide incentives to lure companies to one state or another. But all the resources that states waste on those efforts are resources they don’t have to make their people more productive.

-Noah Berger, co-author of study showing that high wages and productivity in states is closely correlated with having a well-educated workforce, but there is no significant link between a state’s tax rates and its wages (Source: http://wapo.st/178sTOg)

The drug testing of SNAP recipients is yet another ideological sideshow that disfigures substance-abuse policy. It falsely implies that substance use disorders are a widespread cause of welfare dependence. It also implies, again falsely, that these disorders are highly concentrated among recipients of public aid.

– Harold Pollack and Sheldon Danziger, writing in the Washington Post (Source: http://wapo.st/17MV4k9)

We turn people away every day who need help because they aren’t ill enough, and we just don’t have enough money to pay our contractors to hire enough therapists and provide enough medication to reach people. So then they get sicker, and finally, they do meet the criteria.

-Terri White, director of the Oklahoma Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services (Source: http://bit.ly/173SGHy)

Requiring a woman to show her identification before purchasing the pill seems designed to intimidate or humiliate consumers.  State legislation requires everyone to show identification to purchase over-the-counter medications that include pseudoephedrine. That’s because it is a key component in making methamphetamine. Requiring consumers to show ID for pseudoephedrine is designed to curtail criminal activity.  State legislation seems to equate the two — contraception and manufacturing drugs.

-Muskogee Phoenix Editorial Board (Source: http://bit.ly/16ZXu0w)

Public education has not failed. Ninety-five percent of our schools are successful. Test scores are higher than ever. Our dropout rate is lower than ever. The achievement gaps are narrowing. We must tell policymakers we are here and will not allow our public schools to be dismantled.

-Sand Springs Superintendent Lloyd Snow (Source: http://bit.ly/16TTS02)

My fear is that physicians will be even more reluctant to be honest when curative treatment is futile. Needless suffering should be outlawed by our state leaders if they are intent on practicing medicine without a license.

-Annette Prince, director of the Oklahoma Palliative Care Resource Center, on a new Oklahoma law that seeks to ban doctors from denying aggressive medical treatments to elderly, disabled, or dying patients, even if the treatment could cause great suffering with little chance of success (Source: http://bit.ly/17rWnok)

If your response is, ‘Well, the hospital closed because we couldn’t keep it open and the doctors are 80 miles away in this other town,’ as an employer I’m going to say, ‘Well, I’m going to move to this other town that’s 80 miles away because they’ve got a doctor.’ It is an economic development issue as much as anything else.

-Sen. Brian Crain, R-Tulsa, on why keeping rural hospitals open is important for Oklahoma’s economy. Hospitals will struggle with reduced reimbursements for treating the uninsured if Oklahoma does not accept federal funds to expand Soonercare or Insure Oklahoma. (Source: http://bit.ly/17oY6e5)

An older offender came up to me … and he said, ‘Just remember, we let you work here.’  We’re so outnumbered. They could take this place over anytime if they wanted to, any time, and there’s nothing we can do about it.

Lt. Jai Batson, an officer at the Joseph Harp Correctional Center in Lexington Oklahoma (Source: http://bit.ly/16PA0uT)

There’s any number of ways that this could have been done, but everybody had an objection with one of the ways to get it done. Rather than put the interest of public safety first, they’ve put how we get it done ahead of the families that can’t get autopsy results.

-Sen. Clark Jolley, R-Edmond, on lawmakers’ continuing failure to replace Oklahoma’s decrepit State Medical Examiner facility (Source: http://bit.ly/16uvVfF)

If they can’t be profitable without a tax giveaway, there are other problems.  We generally don’t use tax policy to continue to subsidize permanently what the private sector should be able to do on its own.

-David Blatt, director of Oklahoma Policy Institute, on Oklahoma continuing to subsidize oil & gas companies with state tax credits for horizontal drilling (Source: http://bit.ly/16NCKa0)