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Tax cuts and consequences

Plunging state tax collections are wreaking havoc on the state budget and having increasingly painful effects on public services in Oklahoma. Initial estimates were for tax collections for the current year, FY ‘10, to be more than $600 million below… Read more [More...]

Sunk: Mercury Marine fiasco casts light on costs of state subsidy wars

Over the past several months, we have blogged several times on state tax incentives, in particular on the need to strengthen transparency and evaluation of tax credit programs (see our posts here,  here, here and here). The issue  seems to… Read more [More...]

Snapshot of Oklahomans in poverty

Oklahoma’s Poverty Profile: 2008 is a new two-page fact sheet of graphs and analysis that spotlights some of the salient characteristics of the population living in poverty in our state. The information is all assembled from the U.S. Census Bureau’s… Read more [More...]

This American Health Care debate

As the national health care reform debate has unfolded this past year, we have occasionally tried to point our readers towards good sources for making sense of these complicated issues. This post from  the summer suggested some especially useful magazine… Read more [More...]

Stimulus reports–some things are illuminated

In October, federal agencies, grantees, and contractors who are getting some of the stimulus (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act or ARRA) money are required to submit six month reports. This post points you to places you can see reports or… Read more [More...]

KIDSCOUNT Data Center tells us how Oklahoma kids are doing

For advocates, policymakers, and the general public, having access to reliable data is among the essential building blocks of informed discussion and debate. Last week at the Fall Forum event of the Oklahoma Institute for Child Advocacy (OICA), participants were… Read more [More...]

College savings plan–time to get serious

We’ve recently joined with CFED, a national organization dedicated to expanding economic opportunity, and the Oklahoma Asset Building Coalition, in releasing the 2009-2010 Assets and Opportunity Scorecard. Our earlier post summarized the Oklahoma results, as did several media reports. One… Read more [More...]

Medicaid in-home support programs: getting more for less

From time to time we publish guest blog posts that help illuminate a policy issue or advance the discussion of public policy in Oklahoma (see our guest blog guidelines). This post was written by Laura Dempsey-Polan of Life Senior Services,… Read more [More...]

Nearing exhaustion: As recession drags on, long-term unemployed risk losing benefits

Our October edition of Numbers You Need is now out, providing a snapshot of economic and budget trends in Oklahoma through monthly data on jobs, inflation, public benefits, and state revenues, as well as the most recent quarterly data on… Read more [More...]

Continuing bleak revenue collections provide no easy solutions

Yesterday’s announcement of state revenue collections for September marked the end of a truly dismal quarter. Collections for the 1st quarter of FY ’10 were 29.5 percent below the first three months of FY ’09. The graph below shows that… Read more [More...]

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