James Lankford: “in Oklahoma, if you were to go to any house anywhere in the State right now and ask them how their money should be…”

“in Oklahoma, if you were to go to any house anywhere in the State right now and ask them how their money should be spent, they would probably smile at you and say: I would like to decide that, not somebody else. That would be a pretty common conversation, I would bet, in most every State. For a lot of folks in my State that make $55,000, $60,000--make enough to be able to get by, work hard, take care of their kids and their family--it is a challenge for them from day to day, so every single dollar counts to them. They think about how every single dollar is spent or saved. That is why it is surprising, in all the dialogue right now about government waste--there is a big dialogue about how do we handle waste and how do we cut back and how fast should we cut back and what should that look like. But Oklahomans that I talk to are not offended that we are actually cutting back on waste. Now, they may have questions about how it is done and the speed and where it comes out. Those are all reasonable questions we should have a national dialogue on. But when Oklahomans hear that USAID last year did a grant of $32,000 to create a comic book about transgenders in Peru, they would say to me: Hey, I would like to be able to spend that $32,000 myself rather than the transgender comic book in Peru. If the folks in Peru want that comic book, maybe they should pay for it, not American taxpayers.…”