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

Official Statement of 1889 Institute: Open Oklahoma’s Schools

Byron Schlomach, director of the 1889 Institute, issued the following statement today regarding the ongoing school closures throughout Oklahoma as a result of the Oklahoma State Board of Education’s response to the COVID-19 virus: Way back in March, the 1889 Institute first protested school closings based on then-existing evidence that school-age children are not prone to the disease, evidence confirmed in intervening months. This evidence, combined with the failure of school districts to provide a rigorous online education and the hardship on two-earner families created by distance learning, makes it clear that closing the schools has, indeed, been a policy error of epic proportions. To that end, 1889 Institute is calling on the Board of Education to rescind its current guidance that recommends such closures and reopen traditional brick and mortar schools immediately following the upcoming Christmas break. Not doing so is a disservice to both students and parents and will have a last...
Read more

Oklahoma Is OK, but Seriously, That’s Not OK

The Americans at the table, negotiating a business deal, ask one of their number, “You can speak Dutch?” He replies, “I’m OK.” With his fellow Americans looking doubtful, he proceeds to mistranslate what they want him to say to their Dutch counterparts. The “OK” translator tells the Dutch that the Americans really need a hug, when he was supposed to tell them they really need the deal. With that, the AT&T commercial ends as one of the Dutch negotiators gives an American a hug with the announcer saying, “When just OK is not OK.” There are several of these commercials, each with a different scenario, in which, indeed, just OK is not OK. And every time I see one of these commercials I think of the license plates that were once so common – “ Oklahoma is OK. ” As someone who works to develop policy suggestions intended to make Oklahoma better, and hopefully, the best that Oklahoma can be, it often seems that slogan – Oklahoma is OK – gets in the way. The fact is, in most r...
Read more

Oklahoma Leaders Should Demand Congress Fix the Supreme Court’s Mess, Not Rush to Strike a Deal with the Tribes

Five lawyers in Washington, D.C. have announced that many of us have been living on Indian reservations all this time, we just didn’t know it. In response, several of our elected state leaders have made noises indicating they are in the process of giving away the store in resulting negotiations with tribal leaders, apparently driven by defeatism and panic. They should get off this losing course, and instead demand that the one body that can fix this mess do so: Congress. First, how we got here. Jimcy McGirt, a revolting human being who was convicted of molesting, raping, and forcibly sodomizing his wife’s four-year-old granddaughter, has been justly rotting away in a cage for some 20 years as part of the 1,000-years-plus-life-in-prison sentence he was mercifully handed by an Oklahoma jury in 1997. McGirt came up with a clever legal theory, though. He claimed the State of Oklahoma never had jurisdiction to prosecute him because he is Indian and his crimes were committed on Creek reserv...
Read more

What if Legislators Were Licensed? Well, Just to Make a Point...

1889 Institute, as a general matter, objects to occupational licensing. We have written about it more than any other subject. The scant benefits simply do not outweigh the enormous costs to consumers and entrepreneurs, and  the  burdens that disproportionately impact the poor.   It must be noted that the remainder of this post is a work of satire. This should be obvious to anyone who has read even one of our papers, but each of the proposals below has an analogous provision in Oklahoma licensing laws. To those supportive of government-created cartels, these proposals might sound almost reasonable.  A material threat to the public safety and welfare has for too long gone entirely unregulated, unrestrained and unchecked. This menace has the power to corrode not only mere industries, but to corrupt the entire state economy. It’s no overstatement to say that the practitioners of this perilous profession hold the power to destroy democracy as we know it. After a...
Read more