One Person Can Make A Difference

  President Reagan once said, regarding the legislative branch, that you couldn't make them see the light, but you could make them feel the heat.

   A very good example of that occurred this past week but first, some background. Last May, the Republican dominated legislature was looking for a way to fill an $800+ million budget hole brought on by a fall in energy prices and tax cuts. The tax cuts passed a few years ago were a good thing. Too bad state spending was not cut as well.

 My state representative Mark Lepak voted for the cigarette tax last year and this year. So when the cigarette tax came up last May, I called Mark Lepak and told him I hoped he'd vote against it and if he didn't, I'd run against him. He voted for the cigarette tax, called a 'fee,' and now I'm running against Mark Lepak.

The Tobacco Settlement Endowment Trust

By: Theodore King - The Tobacco Settlement Endowment Trust (TSET) is a billion dollar smoked piggy bank for healthcare with very little healthcare being given to Oklahomans. Voters approved a constitutional amendment to create TSET as a state agency in 2000 to spend money from the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement (MSA) between the tobacco companies and 46 states, including Oklahoma, that sued the tobacco companies for the states’ treating people with smoking-related illnesses. TSET today has collected payments amounting to a billion dollars. By 2025 it may have two billion dollars. Since 2001, TSET has spent the interest from those payments, which amounts to 290 million dollars. TSET is a cash cow milked mostly for the benefit of others, so remotely related to healthcare costs including Medicaid, as to be extraneous to those purposes for which the MSA money was intended.