President Donald Trump’s administration is taking some cues from the productive Kentucky Legislature.

After a frenetic first week of the 2017 session of the Kentucky General Assembly during which seven bills were passed, the new Trump administration offered a proportional amount of accomplishment during its first five days in the White House.

Trump took 15 major actions in his first five days, including steps toward ending Obamacare and withdrawing the nation from the Trans-Pacific Partnership – a victory for Kentucky farmers, who grow more than 87,000 acres of tobacco annually.

I called for both actions in this column during the recent election season.

The Obama administration embedded its hatred of the tobacco companies into the 12-nation TPP deal, excluding these firms from protections available to all other industries against foreign governments taking property without compensation or seizing assets in the name of “public health.”

While the deal contained some attractive tax and tariff cuts, it’s unacceptable to single out a specific industry and its legal product based on ideology and the running amok of political correctness.

Still, it’s important for our nation’s security and for Kentucky farmers and manufacturers to maintain a strong, open trading relationship with willing countries.

As Frederic Bastiat, the great 19th century free-market French economist, believed: “If goods don’t cross borders, armies will.”

Democrats who lost the Kentucky House on the same night they turned over the keys to the White House complain about the feverish pace of it all.

Yet most of the legislation debated and passed in Frankfort during the first week in January – right-to-work, repeal of costly prevailing-wage mandates on public construction projects, making part-time politicians’ pensions transparent and pro-life bills – had been debated and passed by the state Senate for years.

School-choice legislation also fits that scenario.

It’s likely this session won’t end before Kentucky becomes the 44th state with a charter-school law and perhaps also the 18th state to turn tax-credit-friendly donations into scholarships allowing children from countless numbers of families access to a private education.

Louisville Rep. Phil Moffett’s charter-school legislation would offer Kentucky’s kids the opportunity to attend schools that will allow them, in many cases, to break the cycle of generations of poverty, illiteracy and failure.

Opponents continue to offer recycled claims about how empowering parents to choose the school that best fits their children’s educational needs somehow is a vast right-wing conspiracy to destroy public education.

But wait a sec’.

Charter schools are public schools.

Along with the reality that policies like Moffett’s bill haven’t caused an implosion of public education in those 43 other states is the expectation hardworking taxpayers have when they fork over their hard-earned dollars – $10.1 billion designated for K-12 schools in the commonwealth’s current biennial budget.

They want their money used for educating children, not propping up failing systems or sustaining jobs programs for adults.

While discussing his bill at a recent education forum in an inner-city church in West Louisville, Moffett told the largely minority crowd: it’s time to take a cue from its neighbor to the North.

Indiana is changing its approach – “to thinking about public education, not public-school systems,” the former GOP gubernatorial candidate said.

The shift has resulted in many more options for Hoosier State parents – from charter schools to vouchers to tax-credit scholarships and even individual tax credits for private-school enrollment and tax deductions for homeschooling families.

The Hoosier State has one of America’s biggest school-choice buffets and fastest-growing economies.

Kentucky will take major steps toward setting its table with the same kind of spread with similar results when it gets back in the kitchen on Feb. 7.It can’t happen fast enough.

Jim Waters is president of the Bluegrass Institute for Public Policy Solutions, Kentucky’s free-market think tank. Read his weekly Bluegrass Beacon column at www.bipps.org. He can be reached at jwaters@freedomkentucky.com and @bipps on Twitter.