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.

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

While tax day is still over a month away, the state tax structure got some serious attention this week from OK Policy.  Gene Perry made the case for sales tax reform in an Okahoman op-ed this weekend, citing a new issue brief that the sales tax doesn’t raise enough revenue to fund core public services and fails to evenly distribute the costs of governing.  The state income tax is set to be slashed again in January 2012; our new fact sheet, Cutting Oklahoma’s top income tax rate: Who benefits?, reports that the bulk of the cut goes to the top 1 percent, while forty-three percent of Oklahomans receive no tax cut at all.  Unless the legislature acts, the cut will reduce available revenues for FY’12 by $38 million, and when fully phased-in, by $120 million.  OK Policy’s perspective was also included in a Tulsa world editorial chastising state leadership for a top rate tax cut in a time of budget distress.

State spending as a share of the overall economy will reach a 30-year low in 2011, according to a fact sheet released on Wednesday.  While many in the state have cautioned that government shouldn’t be allowed to grow faster than the economy, the data reveals that the exact opposite is occurring, as 2011 marks the lowest percentage of state appropriated spending as a share of personal earnings in thirty years.  In fact, we may have reached a point where we are not making the investments in the core public services that support Oklahoma families, businesses, and communities.  An editorial in the Oklahoman on Thursday contends, “Not everyone will find this as alarming as does Blatt, but his point is well taken.” Read the rest of this entry »

Two years ago this month, the Oklahoman and Tulsa World announced a content-sharing agreement in which each paper would carry some stories created by the other. The papers also said they would “focus on reducing some areas of duplication, such as sending reporters from both The Oklahoman and the Tulsa World to cover routine news events.” With the agreement, the Capitol Bureau staffs of the two papers, which had consisted of six reporters a short time earlier, was pared down to three.

For many observers, this shrinking press pool of the state’s two major dailies marked another key moment in the erosion, and potential disappearance, of state political news coverage. According to a 2009 article in the Oklahoma Gazette (unavailable online), the Capitol press corps, which at its peak in 1977 counted 39 reporters, now numbers in the teens.  Smaller papers have eliminated their Capitol reporter positions, TV news stations (other than OETA) cover the Legislature only intermittently, if at all, and even the Associated Press has cut back its staff.  While a small nucleus of experienced, committed Capitol reporters remain, the ongoing capacity of the media to go beyond rewriting press releases and provide Oklahoma with in-depth, informed reporting on public affairs seemed very much in doubt. Read the rest of this entry »

Everyone would agree that the right to vote is one of the most basic and cherished freedoms in a democracy. A ballot measure facing Oklahoma’s voters in November, SQ 746, raises the question of whether protecting the right to vote against the perceived possibility of fraud is worth the risk of potentially disenfranchising eligible voters.

SQ 746 ( ballot title;  full text) would amend Oklahoma’s constitution to require every person appearing to vote to provide proof of identity by presenting either a valid government-issued picture identification or a non-picture voter registration card. Those unable or unwilling to produce proof of identity would be allowed to cast a provisional ballot by swearing an affidavit as to their identity.  Oklahoma would join 21 other states that require ID for all voters, of which three – Florida, Indiana, and Georgia – accept only photo IDs.

Proponents of SQ 746 describe it as a  “common-sense idea” that would place no more onerous a requirement on those looking to vote as on those cashing a check or boarding an airplane.  Although supporters acknowledge that they have found no evidence of  major or systematic in-person voter fraud in Oklahoma, SQ 746 is defended as “a pre-emptive step to keep voter fraud from starting.” Read the rest of this entry »

My decision to take vacation over the final week of July and first week of August allowed me to avoid not only some of the worst of the summer heat wave here in Oklahoma but also much of the heated controversy that followed the release of OK Policy’s issue brief on State Question 744, the ballot measure that would peg education funding in Oklahoma to per pupil expenditures in neighboring states. We set out four main arguments that have led us to take a position opposing the measure, the most compelling of which is the strong likelihood that mandating an estimated $1.7 billion increase in funding for common education over three years without a new revenue source would set the state even  further behind in our other areas of public investment that all Oklahomans, including our schoolchildren and teachers, depend on.

Our position was strongly praised by the Oklahoman in a written editorial and this video editorial by editor Ed Kelly (you’ll first get a short commercial for an investment company):

Read the rest of this entry »

This week, the Oklahoman’s editorial board revisited the question of whether the state’s budget crisis is the result of the large and permanent tax cuts enacted during the mid-2000′s when the economy was booming and state revenues were soaring.  The Oklahoman’s assertion is:

Had the cuts not been made, revenues would still be in the trough and more money would have been appropriated, leading to a similar — or worse — scenario than what we face today.

We examined this issue in a blog post back in November when this debate first flared up. In our humble opinion, the position we laid out then remains valid and bears keeping in mind: Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, the Oklahoman published a “Tax Day” editorial addressing OK Policy’s recent contributions to the debate on the state budget crisis. They began by emphasizing our common ground:

Along with the Oklahoma Policy Institute’s David Blatt, we’ve been urging lawmakers to use the downturn to find sensible new sources of revenue (such as ending or capping ineffective tax credits) and to better prepare for the next downturn.

This is a meaningful and much-appreciated acknowledgment, as the need for new sources of revenue is a contentious principle  at the Legislature and around the state these days (See this insightful article by Patrick McGuigan on how this issue divides the state’s two policy think-tanks, us and the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs). But the Oklahoman proceeds to reject one of our main proposals for bridging the budget gap, doing away with the exemption that allows taxpayers who itemize their returns to also claim the deduction for state income taxes from their state taxes. The exemption costs the state an estimated $118 million on income tax revenue annually, which at a time of drastic budget scenarios, could make a major difference in preserving critical public services.

We have noted that the exemption for state income tax benefits only the minority of taxpayers, about one in four, who claim itemized deductions. Their editorial states:

That alone is reason to urge caution — especially considering that some states (most notably Texas) have no income tax and Oklahoma’s maximum personal income tax rate is uncomfortably high at 5.5 percent. Read the rest of this entry »

Just a quick post to let you know that the Oklahoman today ran an op-ed setting out the policy proposals we have developed for managing budget downturns. The op-ed was based on the full issue brief and 1-page summary we released last week, which was in turn based on the series of blog posts that we ran last month looking at forecasting, reserve funds, tax cuts and tax expenditures.  If you haven’t had the chance yet to take a look at what we’re proposing, we hope you’ll check out one of these pieces. No word yet on when our proposals will be released as a major motion picture with Happy Meal (TM)  tie-in.

Plunging state tax collections are wreaking havoc on the state budget and having increasingly painful effects on public services in Oklahoma. Initial estimates were for tax collections for the current year, FY ‘10, to be more than $600 million below the prior year. Three months into FY ‘10, General Revenue  (GR) collections are already almost $400 million below estimate.  Even assuming the economy begins an immediate recovery, we are forecasting that this year’s GR collections will come in at least $1. 5 billion, or 25 percent, below levels in the year preceding the downturn (FY’08).

This acute drop in revenue collections has set off a debate among politicians, editorial boards, and others about whether tax cuts approved by the Oklahoma Legislature during the economic boom years of the mid-2000s are to blame. Read the rest of this entry »

The Oklahoman recently ran an editorial calling attention to the especially heavy toll that the current recession is having on male workers nationally and here in Oklahoma. A new issue brief from Economic Policy Institute, using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and Current Population Survey, provides some startling state-level data that bears out this point.

In the 4th quarter of 2007, which marked the onset of the national recession, Oklahoma’s unemployment rate was 3.4 percent for men and 4.2 percent for women. In the just-completed 2nd quarter of 2009, while the female unemployment rate had inched up a mere 0.2 percentage points to 4.6 percent, the male unemployment rate had soared 4.2 percentage points to 7.6 percent. Thus,  over a span of eighteen months, the job market switched from one where women were somewhat likelier than men to be unemployed to one where the male unemployment rate is a full three percentage points higher than that of women.

Oklahoma’s gender profile mirrors the national picture but in somewhat more extreme form.  Nationally, unemployment rates for females at the start of the recession were 0.2 percentage points higher than for males (4.9 percent compared to 4.7 percent), a smaller gender gap than in Oklahoma. Today, the male unemployment rate for men nationally is 3 percentage points higher for men than for women (10.7 percent compared to 7.7 percent), the same size gap as in Oklahoma.

The Oklahoman’s explanation for what has happened is persuasive and is echoed by others who have reported on the subject :

The recession is hitting hardest on sectors over which men have traditionally dominated — construction, heavy manufacturing, mining, etc. — and hitting the lightest on sectors where women have traditionally ruled — education, health care, government service.

Looking ahead, the gender gap is expected to worsen as unemployment levels remain high over the next year. EPI’s report includes projections for the 2nd quarter of 2010, when economic forecasters expect unemployment to peak. They predict Oklahoma’s unemployment rate will rise to 7.3 percent for all workers; for men, unemployment is projected to be 9.0 percent (a 1.2 percentage point increase from 2009), compared to 5.3 percent for women (a 0.7 percentage point increase from 2009).

EPI’s report also shows that ethnic minorities – African Americans and Hispanics – are being hurt worse than Whites during the downturn and that these disparities will also worsen over the next year. Due to inadequate sample sizes, EPI was unable to provide estimates of unemployment rates by ethnicity for Oklahoma.

The loss of male jobs during this downturn is likely to have far-reaching consequences for the economy, communities, and families that will take a long time to fully understand and address. Will we see  more men move into traditionally female occupations in the education and health care sectors? Will we see shifts in family formation and child-rearing roles if more women become the primary breadwinners? Let’s hope that policymakers start soon to think about these questions and begin to think about crafting solutions to ensure that the economy that emerges out of this downturn is one that provides opportunities for all.