By:
Paul Shinn
July 30, 2009 // Updated: May 2, 2019
As the debate about the speed and impact of stimulus spending rages on, Good Jobs First is taking on the less glamorous but equally important task of assessing accountability in state spending of funds from the stimulus bill (more formally,…
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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…
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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…
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By:
Paul Shinn
July 27, 2009 // Updated: May 2, 2019
In the last days of this year’s legislative session, House Bill 2250 passed with little fanfare. HB 2250 puts a tax on wire transfers–$5 plus one percent on the amount over $500, with proceeds going to the Bureau of Narcotics…
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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…
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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…
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By:
Paul Shinn
July 21, 2009 // Updated: May 2, 2019
Last week, State Treasurer Scott Meacham unveiled the the state revenue report for June, 2009. Revenue was below the previous year, for both the last month and the fiscal year as a whole, as we reported earlier.
It’s natural to…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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