Skip to main content

About Those Roads in Texas

As Sooner fans head south for the OU-Texas game next week, they will encounter a phenomenon most of us are familiar with: as you cruise across the Red River suddenly the road gets noticeably smoother. The painted lane stripes get a little brighter and the roadside “Welcome to Texas” visitors’ center gleams in the sunlight, a modern and well-maintained reminder of how much more money the Lonestar State spends on public infrastructure than little old Oklahoma.

Or does it? Why are the roads so much, well… better in Texas? Turns out, it isn’t the amount of money spent, at least not when compared to the overall size of the state’s economy and personal income of its inhabitants. Research conducted by 1889 Institute’s Byron Schlomach reveals that Oklahoma actually spends significantly more on roads than Texas as a percentage of both state GDP and personal income. And that was data from 2016, before Oklahoma’s tax and spending increases of recent years. The gap is likely greater today.

Here are the numbers: Oklahoma spends 1.5% of its citizens’ personal income on highways (adjusted for cost of living); Texas spends 0.99%. This means that, as a percentage of its taxpayers’ income, Oklahoma spends approximately 50% more. When expressed as a percentage of the state economy, we see a similar picture: Oklahoma highway spending amounts to 1.2% of its GDP, and Texas’ is just 0.8% (again, Oklahoma spends about 50% more). And that doesn’t even take into account the fact that Texas must cover nearly four times the territory of Oklahoma. That’s a lot of road miles.

How can this be? In short, it appears that Oklahoma government is simply inefficient. This same story repeats in other areas. For example, Massachusetts—home to numerous world class hospital systems—actually spends less on hospitals than Oklahoma does (again, not in total dollars but compared to the size of the two states’ economies and personal incomes). In fact, as a percentage of personal income, Oklahoma spends roughly double the Bay State. The same is true when Oklahoma’s spending is compared to other states in higher education, common ed, and corrections. If you peruse the data, you see that while we are not the worst performer in any category, we certainly have room for improvement.

Perhaps, you might say, Oklahoma’s overall GDP and personal income figures are so low as to skew the numbers. That is, maybe there is a certain level of “start up” cost to these large endeavors, and Oklahoma is simply below that threshold. Or maybe other states gain the efficiencies of scale necessary to drive down the overall cost figure. Unfortunately, neither explanation is supported by the data. Several high income states with large economies are also very inefficient in various categories. New York ranks near the bottom of the 50 states in public education spending efficiency, and California performs terribly in prison spending efficiency. This indicates that simply having a lot of money to play with, by itself, does not produce efficiencies of scale or cross a threshold that begins to make the per capita spending picture look better. Moreover, Oklahoma actually ranks comparatively well in the income category when the figures are adjusted for cost of living (12th out of 50 states), so it is hard to say we are inefficient because we have relatively low incomes.

Perhaps there is a more fundamental lesson to learn from these statistics, related to what the old timers called making a dollar stretch. In the short term, we can’t wave a magic wand and have billions more to spend on roads and hospitals and prisons. But we can start considering how efficiently the tax dollars we do spend are utilized. The recent restructuring of state agencies to make them more directly accountable to the Governor is a positive first step, but only a first step. Performance audits of state agencies would assist the legislature in evaluating how efficiently agencies spend money. Competitive bidding laws may need to be reviewed. Perhaps state employees could be incentivized to find cost savings. There has been no shortage of proposals over the years to make government more efficient and effective.

But such proposals are merely words on a page unless they are given life by elected leaders with a commitment to the principle that when the government takes our money, it ought to make each dollar stretch as far as possible.

Maybe then we could smooth out the bumps on the road to Dallas.

Benjamin Lepak is Legal Fellow at the 1889 Institute. He can be reached at blepak@1889institute.org.

The opinions expressed in this blog are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the official position of 1889 Institute.

Popular posts from this blog

COVID-1984: Have Americans Become Too Complacent in Our Liberties?

Alongside the coronavirus, another pandemic is gripping our country, one that we will feel the consequences of long after we reach herd immunity. I dub this pandemic COVID-1984, and I fear it will rot the roots of the Tree of Liberty. The consequence will be a government emboldened by a passive citizenry. One of the most surprising aspects of our current situation is how willing people have been to report their fellow citizens to authorities for the most minor and meaningless offenses. I used to wonder how people in authoritarian countries like Stalinist Russia and Maoist China went along with those cruel regimes. It turns out a tiny bit of fear is all you need to be a successful dictator. And now it’s all the easier to report your neighbors for reading alone on the beach with tip lines.   Even as governors and judges begin to lift stay at home orders, mayors are extending them. A county judge issued a temporary restraining order against Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker’s sta...
Read more

How Biden/Harris and Well-educated Sophisticates Are Wrong in the Age of COVID-19

Vice President-elect Kamala Harris often declared during the campaign that “We believe in science.” And judging by the tendency of the college-educated , especially among the sophisticates living on the coasts, to agree with Harris’s positions on everything from climate change to proper precautions amid COVID-19, belief in “science” seems to many a mark of knowledge and wisdom. But is it? The modern belief in “science” increasingly appears to be a religion wherein the words of certain recognized experts are received with the reverence once reserved for the Pope. A college diploma almost serves as a permission slip to suspend one’s own judgment and reason in favor of taking the word of certain experts to heart, especially if they work in government, certain universities, or gain media credence.   This tendency to turn experts and the media into high priests of all knowledge is nothing new. In 1986, 60 Minutes ran a story about a phenomenon people experienced in cars with automatic...
Read more

AG Hunter Lowers Boom on Barrier to Entry; Legislature Should Follow His Lead

Even as the Oklahoma Supreme Court  struck down  a recent alcohol distribution law, the Attorney General paved the way for the state’s Alcoholic Beverage Law Enforcement Commission (ABLE) to remove an obstacle from the expansion of liquor store competition - finding that Oklahoma’s five-year in-state residency requirement before one can own a liquor store likely runs afoul of the U.S. Constitution and recent U.S. Supreme Court precedent.  The AG’s  opinion , issued at the end of December, informs the state’s alcohol commission that portions of the state constitution (Article 28A, Section 4(A) & (B)) are unenforceable. These provisions require that ABLE issue a Retail Spirits License or Wine and Spirits Wholesaler License only to someone who has been a resident of Oklahoma for the previous five years. Presumably ABLE, who requested the opinion, will now begin issuing licenses to otherwise qualified applicants regardless of how long they have lived in Okl...
Read more

When It Comes to the Cox Center, “What if I Get to Meet a Movie Star?” Isn’t Good Enough

In a recent   post , 1889 Institute expounded on the fiduciary duty of elected officials “to act in the best interest of the people of the state as a whole,” a “high duty, executed as a public trust … wherein one puts the people’s interest above one’s own.” This fiduciary duty must not stop with elected officials. Once an elected body or an elected official – the legislature, a city council, the governor, or a mayor – has taken final action, the faithful implementation of each enacted law, policy, or program falls to an army of bureaucrats. Thus, a fiduciary duty to execute laws and policies with diligence and integrity, tantamount to that of elected officials, must extend to government employees. Recently, I had a few moments to sit down and watch a show with my children. Unsurprisingly, my son picked a series entitled “The Stinky and Dirty Show.” I was naturally skeptical that the show would yield any real value. However, as I watched, I found myself pleasantly surprised. Each ep...
Read more