BY KAREN WEBB
The other night on the news they talked about funding for senior programs in Oklahoma, and they certainly do need more funding. However, having a woman stand at the podium in the Oklahoma House, speaking to seniors who are there to lobby, and telling them they need to tell their legislators that they want to take money from Oklahoma public schools to fund senior programs, caused me to nearly upchuck my dinner.
Oklahoma teachers are ranked 48th in pay and the students are ranked 46th in the amount of money spent on each one of them. The Oklahoma Legislature is now in the control of the GOP and they get a whole lot of help from the governor on taxes.
They are completely out of their minds.
Oklahoma ranks 40th in overall tax burdens, 31st in the percentage of value of the home they pay in taxes and 43rd in the amount of their income they pay in property taxes.
Oklahoma is the 19th best state for business because we are 13th in corporate welfare and as anti-labor as they can get. We need to tell Devon Energy to forget that skyscraper monument to greed and start paying taxes to fund schools and senior programs.
I cannot believe that the Oklahoma Council on Aging is creating a generational war over funding. They need to be telling the Legislature they are tired of this war on students, teachers, seniors and the poor in favor of giving all the breaks to the wealthy and big corporations.
They have spent huge amounts of time this year on fighting anything President Obama puts out there for purely political reasons. Oklahoma has more than their share of uninsured citizens. They are waging a war on women because they want small government, so tiny it will fit between my doctor and me.
They wage war on kids by not giving them all the information they need to prevent unwanted pregnancies and abortions. They want to tell people who they can and can’t marry and even though there may be 15 churches in one square mile of my house they think we need Bible taught in public schools.
I would rather beg on the streets and eat out of dumpsters before I would suggest to this anti-children, anti-women and anti-civil rights group of corporate lackeys that they take one more dime from education. By the way, they are still trying to cut more taxes and force more of their religious beliefs on us.
– Karen Webb lives in Moore, OK and is a regular contributor to The Oklahoma Observer
Karen, thank you for saying what needed to be said. Our state is in a pathetic mess as it crawls toward the past. The next thing I expect is an effort to pull Oklahoma out of the union like some of the southern states are threatening to do. What happened to the state I used to be proud of? I think it probably can be blamed on the people like me that stay quiet, grumbling but doing nothing as our home becomes the butt of the nation’s jokes.