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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Budget and tax policy has long been at the core of OK Policy's efforts to advance equitable and fiscally responsible policies that expand opportunity for all Oklahoman. Now we are looking to add a experienced and effective budget and tax policy analyst to lead our work in this area. The deadline to apply is Thursday, April 11, 2019.
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By:
David Blatt
March 7, 2019 // Updated: January 6, 2020
Our healthy fiscal outlook provides a great opportunity to build on the progress made last year by making sizeable investments in critical needs that have long gone unmet. However, Governor Kevin Stitt, in his FY 2020 budget blueprint, suggested going in a different direction. The Governor’s approach would tilt the budget too heavily towards savings at the expense of key investments that are urgently needed to promote Oklahoma’s prosperity and well-being.
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Policies that support low-income families improve the well-being of children. Policymakers have a number of options for improving economic prospects for Oklahoma’s working families and in turn improving health - including their mental health. Two practical changes are to restore the refundability of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and increase the minimum wage. Both of these policy changes would provide more economic stability for families, reducing the risk of childhood trauma and poor mental health outcomes that stem from these adverse experiences. Improving the financial well-being of families creates healthier and economically thriving communities.
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