Though revenue collections continue to show steady growth, state budgets remain under great stress. After three successive years of funding cuts, most state agencies are operating this year with appropriations that are at least 10 percent less than prior to the economic downturn. Even if the economy does not slip back into recession, the prospects are dim that revenues will grow sufficiently to restore funding to pre-downturn levels and begin to tackle our long-term obligations.

Budget-cutting efforts in Washington are adding to the perils confronting the state budget. Federal spending has a major impact on both the state economy and the state budget. The federal government spent $38.5 billion in Oklahoma last year, which works out to $10,256 for each resident.  The largest component of federal spending is for direct payments to individuals for Social Security and Medicare, along with salaries and wages to military personnel and other federal employees based in Oklahoma. Read the rest of this entry »

From time to time, we use the OK Policy blog to post contributions that offer interesting perspectives on important policy issues for the state. John Thompson is an Oklahoma City teacher with 18 years of urban high school experience and an education blogger at thisweekineducation.com. He has a doctorate from Rutgers University, and is the author of Closing the Frontier:  Radical Responses in Oklahoma Politics. A follow-up post will explore Oklahoma’s new state law implementing education reforms.

Since President Obama endorsed the mass firings of teachers in Central Falls, Rhode Island, my wife (who originally supported Hillary) has taunted me about teachers ripping their Obama bumper stickers off their cars.   When I explain my contradictory feelings on the President’s policy on schools, my wife’s eyes glaze over, so I will leave it to readers to judge whether continued, cautious support for the Obama policy is prudent or wishful thinking. Read the rest of this entry »

This week, the New York Times magazine ran an extended interview with President Obama on his economic program, while The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza profiled Obama’s budget director, Peter Orzsag.  Both pieces devoted considerable attention to health care reform, and made clear that despite the urgency of dealing with automobile bailouts, financial regulation, housing, and the overall economy, health care remains the Administration’s top legislative priority. But what was striking was that neither piece devoted much attention to the issue of the uninsured and the challenge of expanding coverage to the 45-50 million Americans who currently lack insurance. Instead, the health care issue uppermost in the minds of Obama and Orszag, and the policy proposal on which their initiative seems to hinge, is something most Americans have likely never heard of – comparative effectiveness research.

The term refers to the emerging effort to identify which medical treatments and procedures can be shown to have the most cost-effective outcomes in making people healthier, and to find ways to promote medical decision-making in line with these findings. For the Administration, comparative effectiveness research is the key to health care reform because it provides the possibility of expanding access to care while reining in health care spending, which is essential for the nation’s long-term fiscal stability.

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