OK Policy is now accepting applications for paid, part-time or full-time internships in our Tulsa office during the Summer 2019 semester! We have two types of internships available - the Public Policy Internship and the Open Justice Oklahoma Data Internship. If you’re looking to be part of a team that’s fighting to make Oklahoma better for all Oklahomans, this might be the place for you. The deadline to apply is Sunday, April 21st.
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Six weeks into the 2019 legislative session, the House and Senate hit their second major deadline last Thursday. Bills that failed to pass off the floor of their chamber of origin are now dead for this session.
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A defining issue for this legislature and Governor Stitt's leadership in his first session could be a remarkable advancement in criminal justice reform.
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This week, we launched applications for our annual Summer Policy Institute! The Institute is hosted and led by the staff of OK Policy and involves leading policy experts from government, academia, and community organizations throughout Oklahoma. The deadline to apply is May 27, 2019. In the midst of a severe budget crisis in 2016, the Oklahoma legislature slashed the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) for low-income working families.
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In the fall of 2017, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) issued new rules to protect payday loan customers from some of the most harmful practices in that industry. But now the same federal agency that issued the rule has announced plans to scrap important provisions of it, leaving many consumers unprotected. The good news is that this proposal to roll back the payday rule is still just a proposal. Before this proposal can be finalized, the agency must first allow for public comments, and you can easily submit one.
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In Oklahoma’s tax code, there are multiple tax breaks for high-income individuals and businesses. But just three tax credits are targeted at low-income Oklahomans, and one of those - the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) – was slashed in 2016 to help balance the books during a severe budget crisis. This cut resulted in more than 200,000 Oklahoma families losing some, or all, of the value of their EITC. Statewide, low and middle-income working families lost nearly $28 million due to the cut. That’s an average of $121 per family, and many low-wage families lost even more.
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By:
Steve Lewis
March 11, 2019 // Updated: March 11, 2019
Last week the Legislature turned its accountability focus toward state government, with leadership announcing agreement between the House, Senate and the Governor on five bills to reorganize the governance of five larger state agencies...It will be interesting to see how things work when the power brokers that have been given new powers strongly disagree with each other. It could be a prescription for "gridlock," which would be the opposite of "turnaround."
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The Summer Policy Institute is hosted and led by the staff of OK Policy and involves leading policy experts from government, academia, and community organizations throughout Oklahoma. Participants have a chance to network with fellow students, leaders in the policy process, and past SPI alumni. The Institute is open to any undergraduate or graduate student at an Oklahoma college or university, or graduate from an Oklahoma high school, who has completed a minimum of 24 hours of college credit or graduated December 2018 or later.
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This week, a new study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that despite gains from last year's teacher walkout, Oklahoma school funding is still significantly below pre-recession levels. You can read the full report here. Currently, Oklahoma schools desperately need more counselors, and Education Policy Analyst Rebecca Fine explained why it is in our children's best interest for the legislature to grant the State Department of Education’s request to fund the School Counselor Corps.
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Last week, we reported that just over 1,000 bills and resolutions had survived the initial committee deadline and were still alive. The ranks of surviving bills will be thinned once again by next Thursday, March 14th, the deadline by which bills must pass out of their chamber of origin to avoid being booted off the island (for various exceptions to this rule, see our 2019 Legislative Primer).This coming week will see the sausage-grinding machine speed up considerably, as hundreds of measures vie for hearings during what are expected to be long days and nights on the House and Senate floor. Here are some key bills OK Policy continues to track closely in the areas of criminal justice, education, economic security, and taxes.
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