Former Executive Director David Blatt joined OK Policy in 2008 and served as its Executive Director from 2010 to 2019. He previously served as Director of Public Policy for Community Action Project of Tulsa County and as a budget analyst for the Oklahoma State Senate. He has a Ph.D. in political science from Cornell University and a B.A. from the University of Alberta. David has been selected as Political Scientist of the Year by the Oklahoma Political Science Association, Local Social Justice Champion by the Dan Allen Center for Social Justice, and Public Citizen of the Year by the National Association of Social Workers.
By: David Blatt
August 5, 2009 // Updated: October 17, 2012
Note – Occasionally we plan to re-run blog posts on topical subjects that you may have missed the first time around. Last week brought word from DHS that the number of confirmed cases of child abuse and neglect in Oklahoma… Read more [More...]
By: David Blatt
August 3, 2009 // Updated: May 2, 2019
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… Read more [More...]
By: David Blatt
July 31, 2009 // Updated: October 17, 2012
The New Yorker‘s Shouts & Murmurs humor column recently ran a brilliant piece by Ian Frazier that imagined a colloquium convened by Al Gore to address the problem of global warming… of hell. After presentations by a Samaritan sorcerer of… Read more [More...]
By: David Blatt
July 29, 2009 // Updated: May 1, 2019
We have not yet reached the end of the first month of the new fiscal year but already Treasurer Scott Meacham has publicly predicted that state General Revenue collections will fall far enough short of the forecast to trigger an… Read more [More...]
By: David Blatt
July 28, 2009 // Updated: May 2, 2019
Matt Miller, writing for the TPM Book Club on a new book by Justin Fox called The Myth of the Rational Market, provides a thoughtful reformulation of the “government vs markets” debate:
…we’re too often peddled a phony choice between… Read more [More...]
By: David Blatt
July 24, 2009 // Updated: May 2, 2019
As of today, the federal minimum wage increases to $7.25 per hour, the final step in a three-step increase approved by Congress in 2007, after a decade when the minimum wage remained frozen at $5.15. Thirty-one states, including Oklahoma, will… Read more [More...]
By: David Blatt
July 22, 2009 // Updated: May 2, 2019
As the national health care reform debate continues to heat up, most of the controversy has centered on such hot-button issues as the public option, individual and employer mandates, and paying for expanded coverage. One issue that is of considerable… Read more [More...]
By: David Blatt
July 17, 2009 // Updated: May 2, 2019
This week we released the July edition of Numbers You Need, our monthly bulletin of key economic and budget trends. The monthly report contained some glimmers of good news, as the state’s unemployment rate rose by a relatively modest 0.1… Read more [More...]
By: David Blatt
July 15, 2009 // Updated: May 2, 2019
Five years after voters approved a State Question increasing the tax on tobacco, there is good news to report: over the course of the recently completed fiscal year (FY ’09), tobacco sales in Oklahoma declined by 7.2 percent over the… Read more [More...]
By: David Blatt
July 14, 2009 // Updated: May 1, 2019
Treasurer Scott Meacham today released revenue collections for the final month of the just-completed fiscal year, FY ’09. As was widely expected, the numbers were dismal: June General Revenue (GR) collections came in 30.1 percent below last year and 26.2… Read more [More...]
OKPOLICY.ORG
Note – Occasionally we plan to re-run blog posts on topical subjects that you may have missed the first time around. Last week brought word from DHS that the number of confirmed cases of child abuse and neglect in Oklahoma… Read more [More...]
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… Read more [More...]
We have not yet reached the end of the first month of the new fiscal year but already Treasurer Scott Meacham has publicly predicted that state General Revenue collections will fall far enough short of the forecast to trigger an… Read more [More...]
Five years after voters approved a State Question increasing the tax on tobacco, there is good news to report: over the course of the recently completed fiscal year (FY ’09), tobacco sales in Oklahoma declined by 7.2 percent over the… Read more [More...]
Treasurer Scott Meacham today released revenue collections for the final month of the just-completed fiscal year, FY ’09. As was widely expected, the numbers were dismal: June General Revenue (GR) collections came in 30.1 percent below last year and 26.2… Read more [More...]
