Education Quote by Kathleen Sebelius

A politician’s favorite trick is to treat “economic development” like a vending machine: pour in incentives, wait for growth to drop. Sebelius flips that script. Her line is an indictment of the feel-good mechanics of tax breaks and recruitment packages, calling them “wasted” if Kansas refuses to fund the boring, expensive stuff that actually makes an economy durable: educated people and healthy workers.

The intent is practical, but the subtext is combative. She’s not just prioritizing schools and clinics; she’s challenging the state’s political imagination. “New investment strategies” is the language of boardrooms and ribbon-cuttings, the kind of policy that photographs well. Education and health care are slower returns, harder to brand, and easier to undercut in budget fights. By naming them as the “two most important economic issues,” Sebelius collapses a familiar false division: that social spending is compassionate while “the economy” is hard-nosed. Her move is to argue that cutting classrooms and coverage isn’t fiscal realism; it’s self-sabotage.

In Kansas, that argument lands with particular force because the state’s identity politics often frame public services as costs to be controlled rather than assets to be built. Sebelius is signaling to moderates and business audiences that the state’s competitiveness isn’t primarily a tax rate; it’s human capital and basic stability. The rhetorical power comes from the word “unless”: it turns incentives into a conditional promise, exposing them as performative without the unglamorous infrastructure of thriving lives.