Letter to the Editor
For 15 years, Republicans have controlled Oklahoma’s governor’s office and both chambers of the Legislature. That is long enough to implement an agenda, set priorities and see the results.
So it is fair to ask: Are we satisfied? Answering honestly requires separating two things our politics increasingly treats as inseparable.
Oklahoma is not Washington, D.C. You can support Donald Trump on immigration, taxes or social issues and still look at your child’s school, your community and your hospital and decide Oklahoma’s elected leaders should be doing better. Those positions are not contradictory. A vote for governor is not a vote for president.
The record is not uniformly bad. Poverty has declined, incarceration has fallen and teacher salaries have increased.
But Oklahoma remains near the bottom nationally in education. Our average starting teacher salary, $41,294, ranks 48th. We spend roughly $12,758 per public-school student, also near the bottom.
Those aren’t Washington’s numbers. They’re ours — and after fifteen years of unified Republican government, our state leaders have to answer for them.
Budgets and tax policy reveal priorities even more clearly than rankings do.
In 2023, Oklahoma’s Republican-controlled Legislature passed the Parental Choice Tax Credit, and Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt signed it into law. Republican leaders have since expanded the program.
In the 2025–26 school year alone, the policy resulted in nearly $250 million in approved private-school tax credits for 39,373 students. Only 3,724 had attended an Oklahoma public school the preceding semester. Roughly 90 percent weren’t coming directly from public schools. Nearly $100 million went to households earning more than $150,000.
Parents have every right to choose private education. But for many rural families, there isn’t a private school within a reasonable distance. A tax credit cannot build one. It cannot hire another teacher at the local high school.
For those families, the public school isn’t one choice among several. It is the school.
Who exactly was this policy designed to help? Then consider economic development. Oklahoma’s Five-Year Ad Valorem Tax Exemption predates today’s Republican leadership, but after 15 years of unified control, Republican lawmakers have chosen to maintain the system. In 2024 alone, it cost an estimated $110 million.
Qualifying businesses don’t pay those property taxes, and the state reimburses local governments for the lost revenue.
But the state is us. Those are taxpayer dollars. Homeowners still receive property-tax bills. Farmers, retirees and small businesses still pay theirs. Meanwhile, state government uses taxpayer money to replace revenue from qualifying businesses that are exempted from paying.
Perhaps that’s worthwhile when it produces enough jobs and investment. But Oklahoma’s own independent evaluators found that the exemption’s increasing cost since 2001 had not coincided with significant employment increases in eligible industries.
That brings us to data centers. Oklahoma’s elected leaders have maintained an economic-development system that makes substantial incentives available to qualifying projects, and the state’s Commerce Department actively markets them to data centers: sales-tax exemptions on equipment and, for some qualifying operations, electricity; property-tax exemptions; and potential Quality Jobs payments of up to 5 percent of payroll for as long as ten years.
So when elected officials celebrate billions of dollars in private investment, taxpayers deserve the other side of the equation: How much public support did state policy put on the table, and how many permanent jobs came back?
That matters when communities such as Piedmont and Luther are raising concerns about electricity demand, groundwater and rural land.
Who benefits, and who pays?
LETTER TO EDITOR on page 5
