It was a busy session.  Last Friday marked the deadline for Governor Fallin to take final action on bills that landed on her desk. Now that sine die has passed, we thought it would be useful for OK Policy to do inventory and update you on the status of the bills we wrote about this session on our blog.

There were over two dozen immigration bills introduced this session.  Neither of the ‘English only’ bills, HB 2083 and SB 905, intended as implementing legislation for State Question 751, were approved by the legislature.  On our blog, we advised against passage and pointed out that the bills would have imposed new and draconian restrictions on speech and potentially entangled state officials in a legal double bind.  We also blogged about two bills, SB 683 and HB 1446, that sought to rescind resident tuition eligibility for undocumented high school students enrolling in public colleges and universities.  The stand alone bill, SB 683, died in House committee and the sections pertaining to resident tuition eligibility were removed from HB 1446 in conference committee.  We have blogged extensively about other sections of HB 1446, the omnibus immigration legislation which went through several incarnations and was eventually defeated on the House floor by a vote of 62 (N) to 31 (Y). Read the rest of this entry »

“There’s no excuse for states to let 100 percent federally funded jobless support just die on the vine,” said Christine Owens, Executive Director of the National Employment Law Project. ”This is a no-brainer for states to help their workers, businesses and economies.”

The no-brainer Owens refers to is an unemployment insurance extension known as Extended Benefits approved by Congress and waiting to be used by states.

Oklahoma is one of 9 qualifying states – along with Arkansas, Iowa, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Montana, Utah and Wyoming —that has not taken advantage of the Extended Benefits provision that NELP estimates would provide 13 additional weeks of assistance for over 29,000 long-term unemployed Oklahomans and inject $101 million in federally-funded benefits to help support Oklahoma families and businesses. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week I attended the annual State Fiscal Policy conference hosted by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, the top non-governmental organization analyzing state fiscal policy across the nation. The message we heard was clear and grim: As rough as the past two years of  revenue shortfalls and budget cuts have been here in Oklahoma and across the states, the upcoming budget year, FY ’12, is going to be even worse.

This chart created by the Center presents the story succinctly:

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Despite encouraging signs that an economic recovery is gaining strength, unemployment remains at stubbornly and unacceptably high levels. Nationally, the jobless rate in October stayed stuck at 9.6 percent, while the latest state unemployment numbers found that 121,800 Oklahomans, or 6.9 percent of the workforce, are out of work. While some workers have relatively short stints of unemployment between jobs, the magnitude of the job losses this recession and the slow pace of recent job creation have left a large segment of the unemployed population unable to find work for extended periods. According to the National Employment Law Project, the unemployed are experiencing record periods of joblessness: nearly 42 percent of the 15 million jobless workers are “long-term unemployed”—that is, out of work for six months or longer. With there being 4.6 unemployed workers for every available job, most of the unemployed continue to be without work through no fault of their own.

For many of these jobless workers and their families, weekly Unemployment Insurance (UI) benefits provide an essential safety net allowing them to recoup a portion of their lost income – about $290 per week on average – and  pay the bills without additional public support or a full-blown financial emergency. As in past national recessions, Congress has responded to high levels of unemployment by approving federally-funded extensions of UI benefits that go beyond the basic 26 weeks of state-funded benefits. Under the main temporary program of federal jobless benefits, called Emergency Unemployment Compensation (EUC),  qualified unemployed workers who are actively seeking work receive an additional 34 to 53 weeks of UI benefits, depending on the state’s unemployment rate. NELP reports that so far, in 2010 alone, nearly 9.5 million workers collected federally funded benefits, contributing an estimated $68 billion to the nation’s economy. Read the rest of this entry »

The New York Times this weekend ran an important feature on one important and disturbing sign of the impact of the recession – the large and growing population of food stamp recipients that report zero household income:

About six million Americans receiving food stamps report they have no other income, according to an analysis of state data collected by The New York Times. In declarations that states verify and the federal government audits, they described themselves as unemployed and receiving no cash aid — no welfare, no unemployment insurance, and no pensions, child support or disability pay. Read the rest of this entry »

Across the nation, the deep, prolonged economic recession is putting great strains on state Unemployment Insurance (UI) programs. Oklahoma is hardly immune from these challenges, but our problems are less severe than elsewhere. The combination of having entered the recession with our UI program in good fiscal health, the relative mildness of the downturn in Oklahoma, and the Legislature’s willingness to do what needed to be done to get the boost of available federal stimulus dollars should help  allow the state’s UI program to continue to provide a temporary source of income until employment prospects improve.

As everyone knows, the June jobs report was brutal – the nation lost an additional 467,000 jobs, the unemployment rate reached 9.5 percent, and the total number of unemployed Americans hit 14.7 million, an all-time high. State-level figures for June have not yet been released, but May did bring relatively good news for Oklahoma, as the state’s 0.1 percent increase in the unemployment rate (from 6.2 percent to 6.3 percent) was far less severe than in prior months or in the nation as a whole. Still, the state saw its number of unemployed hit 111,700 for the month, an increase of nearly 50,000 compared to a year prior. The unemployment rate has now topped 7.5 percent in 19 counties, led by Hughes County, whose jobless rate reached 10.9 percent in May. The number of Oklahomans claiming Unemployment Insurance (UI) benefits rose to just under 50,000 in May, a 208 percent increase compared to May 2008. Almost 10,000 long-term unemployed workers in the state who have already exhausted their initial period of UI eligibility have now become eligible for an additional 13 weeks of benefits.

Such developments are putting enormous stress on state unemployment insurance systems. Every state has an Unemployment Insurance Trust Fund which collects revenues and pays out benefits. When fewer workers are employed, states pay out more in benefits while taking in less in UI tax collections. Yet while Oklahoma’s Trust Fund balance has declined over the past year, we are in a much stronger situation than most states.

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Recently, The New York Times had a front-page article spotlighting the extent to which victims of the economic downturn are able to access public benefits that are part of the nation’s safety net.  Most programs, including Unemployment Insurance, food stamps, Medicaid, public housing, and cash assistance, operate as state-federal partnerships in which eligibility rules and administrative practices can vary greatly from one state to another, as well as from one program to another.  This can lead to major disparities in program participation rates across states. For example, 67 percent of the unemployed receive jobless benefits in New Jersey and Idaho, but just 25 percent in Texas.

The Times presents a 50-state table of participation rates in six public benefit programs. Their data shows that Oklahoma is slightly above the national average in the share of eligible individuals receiving food stamp benefits (69 percent compared to 67 percent nationally); the share of eligible households receiving public housing assistance (32 percent compared to 30 percent nationally), and share of uninsured low-income children covered by public health care programs (77 percent compared to 73 percent nationally).

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A new OK Policy issue brief looks at the federal stimulus funding that is being made available to states that adopt a number of modest reforms to their Unemployment Insurance (UI) programs. As the number of jobless workers claiming UI benefits rises rapidly, Oklahoma’s UI program may be approaching a situation, known as conditional factors,  that automatically triggers cuts in jobless benefits and increases in employer taxes to keep the state’s UI Trust Fund solvent. The stimulus bill would provide Oklahoma $75.9 million that could avert or minimize these tax hikes and benefit cuts, contingent on implementing some worthwhile changes to the UI program that Oklahoma has already largely enacted.

Read our four page brief or see this guide from the National Employment Law Project on the various provisions of the stimulus bill benefiting unemployed workers.