What’s up this week at Oklahoma Policy Institute? The Weekly Wonk is dedicated to this week’s events, publications, and blog posts.

This week OK Policy and the Corporation for Enterprise Development (CFED) co-released the 2012 Assets and Opportunity Scorecard, which showed that more than one in four Oklahoma households are “asset poor,” meaning they have little or no financial cushion to rely on in an emergency.  The Tulsa World and the Oklahoman covered Oklahoma’s Scorecard results in depth.

We pointed out that if legislators make the choice to prioritize tax cuts, they cannot pretend to be blameless when funds aren’t available for crucial services.  We hosted a debate about whether or not to require a prescription for pseudoephedrine, featuring Jessica Hawkins, the Director of Prevention Services for the Oklahoma Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services, and former state Senator Ed Long.

Finally this week, the Associated Press quoted us in an article on a regional trend of GOP action to axe state income taxes. The Tulsa World presented a summary of our issue brief defending the income tax. The Journal Record cited our work on worsening poverty in Oklahoma and legislative proposals that would make it even harder to be poor. The OK Policy Blog featured a short video about ‘community schools,’ a comprehensive approach to education that makes the school the hub of the community.

Numbers of the Day

• $136 – Average tax increase on elderly Oklahoma couples with $35,000 in income under a legislative proposal to eliminate a slate of broad-based tax credits and exemptions.
• 8,100 – Number of manufacturing jobs added in Oklahoma from January to December of 2011, up 8.4 percent for the year.
• 178, 020 – Number of Oklahoma children under age 6 who need daily child care during the week because their primary caregiver/s participate in the labor force, 2009
• 6,592 – Number of Oklahomans who tested for their GED in 2009; 70.1 percent received their GED, just above the average national pass rate of 69.4 percent.
• 11^th – Oklahoma’s rank among the states in percentage of households with no computer in their home, 2010

In The Know, Policy Notes

• The Foundation for Child Development finds that states with higher taxes and greater investment in public programs score highest for Child Well-Being.
• The Economic Policy Institute points out that the massive tax cuts propose by GOP presidential candidates don’t square with professed concerns about public debt.
• Demos shows that the pay premium gained by joining the federal workforce is reserved largely for less-skilled workers, and rather than disparaging public sector pay levels, we should embrace them as standards from which the private sector has shamefully deviated over the last three decades.
• The Shriver Center examines the trend of states issuing public benefits through bankcards and the implications of card fees for low-income people.
• Bloomberg Businessweek reports on falling premiums for Medicare Advantage, a private health insurance option for Medicare beneficiaries.

This post is adapted from an upcoming issue brief on savings from Oklahoma Assets, a statewide coalition committed to promoting financial security. Click here for other OK Policy blog posts on assets and financial security.

Most Americans recognize the value of savings, yet over time, American savings have declined sharply. Even before the losses incurred during the Great Recession, a large segment of the population in Oklahoma and across the nation had little or no savings with which to weather a setback or move ahead by investing in the future.  According to the 2009-10 Assets and Opportunity Scorecard, nearly one out of every four Oklahoma households (22.7 percent) lacked sufficient financial assets to subsist at the poverty level for three months. Minority households are also disproportionately prone to possess little savings – the asset poverty rate for minority households in Oklahoma exceeds 40 percent and is 2.75 times greater than for White households. Read the rest of this entry »

The Oklahoma Asset Building Coalition is hosting a series of regional meetings on asset building strategies for increasing the financial security of families and communities throughout Oklahoma. Anyone working in the private sector, public sector or a non-profit with an interest in how building assets can expand and strengthen economic security is invited to attend these meetings that will be held from 10:00 AM to 2:00 pm, with lunch provided, on the following days:

• Broken Arrow, August 31st;
• Durant, Sept. 14th;
• Oklahoma City, Sept. 28th;
• Lawton, Sept. 29th;
• Woodward, Sept. 30th Read the rest of this entry »

For many of us, the economic events of the past two years have eroded our savings and heightened our sense of economic fragility. Yet for many low- and moderate-income households, savings have long been out of reach. The 2009-10 Assets and Opportunity Scorecard, which OK Policy released in partnership with CFED, revealed that in 2006, more than one in five Oklahoma households was in “asset poverty”, meaning that it had insufficient net worth to subsist at the federal poverty level for three months if income were interrupted, such as due to a job loss. Without savings, any minor setback can turn into a full-fledged crisis. More importantly, perhaps, without access to savings to attend college, buy a home, start a business, or retire, the pathway out of poverty and towards economic security is blocked.

It is for this reason that an important and growing movement of anti-poverty advocates have focused in recent years on ways to support savings among low and moderate-income families. As we discussed in our issue brief, “More than Just Getting By, ” public policies in this country have long encouraged savings, ownership and wealth creation through such mechanisms as the home mortgage deduction and preferential tax treatment of capital gains and college 529 plan contributions. The problem is that most low-income households are not in a position to benefit from the asset building policies embedded in the tax code. As a result, one study found that 45 percent of the benefits from federal asset development policies went to the richest 1 percent of households, while less than 3 percent of the benefits went to the bottom 60 percent of households. Read the rest of this entry »

As the economic downturn continues to take its toll in Oklahoma and across the nation, how financially prepared are families to deal with extended periods of unemployment and underemployment. Newly-released data (PDF) from CFED that focuses on “asset poverty” confirms that many Oklahomans have little or no financial cushion on which to fall back.

Asset poverty is a measure that establishes a minimum threshold of wealth needed for household security:

A household is asset poor if it has insufficient net worth to support itself at the federal poverty for three months in the absence of income. Asset poor households would not have enough savings or wealth to provide for basic needs during a sudden job loss or a medical emergency. Read the rest of this entry »

Oklahoma’s Poverty Profile: 2008 is a new two-page fact sheet of graphs and analysis that spotlights some of the salient characteristics of the population living in poverty in our state. The information is all assembled from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, which was released this past August.  Among some of the findings presented in the fact sheet:

• Nearly one in six Oklahomans (15.9 percent) lived below the federal poverty level  in 2008, which was just over $22,000 annual income for a family of four. The state’s 2008  poverty rate was unchanged from 2007 but remained 2.7 percentage points higher than the national average.
• Forty percent of those in poverty, and 6.4 percent of the total population, had incomes of less than half the poverty level (see chart). Read the rest of this entry »