Betting the Farm: Ending the income tax creates huge risks for rural Oklahoma

Oklahoma Farm & Ranch Museum, Elk City
Could doing away with Oklahoma’s income tax shift taxes not only onto low and middle-income families but also from urban areas to rural areas? Many programs, services, and incentives important for rural Oklahoma rely on our existing revenue structure and the income tax in particular. In addition, switching to more reliance on other taxes would especially hurt farmers and ranchers.
States without an income tax have to get resources somewhere to fund their core services. As the chart below shows, the majority of those states look to the property tax to fill the gap. Every one of the states without an income tax pay more in property taxes per capita than we do in Oklahoma. The average per capita property tax collections in no-income tax states, $1,507, is more than two-and-a-half times that of Oklahoma, $582. Read the rest of this entry »

After three straight years of budget cuts, funding for public education in Oklahoma is in dire straits. This year’s appropriation to the Department of Education is $254 million, or 10.0 percent, less than it was in 2009. In the past three years, funding to school districts through the state aid formula, which funds the basic operating costs of schools, has been slashed by $222 million, while public schools enrollment has 
