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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Ron Jenkins of the Associated Press wrote an article that ran this weekend picking up on OK Policy’s recent blog post examining the puzzle of why TANF cash assistance caseloads have been so slow to rise since the onset of…
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Across the nation, the deep, prolonged economic recession is putting great strains on state Unemployment Insurance (UI) programs. Oklahoma is hardly immune from these challenges, but our problems are less severe than elsewhere. The combination of having entered the recession…
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By:
Paul Shinn
July 10, 2009 // Updated: October 17, 2012
Have you visited TED.com? TED gathers smart people for topical conferences and then offers us the speeches in video form, organized both by topic and by user classification–persuasive, beautiful, funny, etc. You’ll find people you’ve heard of, like Al Gore…
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By:
Paul Shinn
July 9, 2009 // Updated: May 2, 2019
The Oklahoma State Board of Education recently adopted higher testing standards for elementary and middle school students. According to the Tulsa World, the higher standards result from recommendations of a committee of educators and business representatives. This effort responded to…
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