Tag: Oklahoma

The Rainy Day Fund debate: Not if, but when…and how much?

If state fiscal conditions can be likened to the weather, it’s been apparent for many months that Oklahoma is in the midst of a toad strangler of a rain, to borrow the Tulsa World’s colorful characterization. Going into the current… Read more [More...]

Saved by the net: Food assistance programs help mitigate recession’s impact

This week we released the November issue of Numbers You Need (PDF), our monthly look at key data on the state’s economy  and budget. As we reported in the bulletin, one of the clearest signs of the depth and length… Read more [More...]

Should the poor pay more?

In Oklahoma, who pays the highest percentage of their income in taxes? Those with the lowest incomes do, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP). The state’s sales, excise and property taxes, which fall disproportionately on the… Read more [More...]

Consistent federal policies regarding Tribal Sovereignty help Oklahoma’s economy

Most people in this country today agree that indigenous tribes, who lived in the Americas before Europeans arrived, were treated less than fairly by their new neighbors. Unfortunately, the inequitable and inconsistent policies with regard to Native tribes are not… Read more [More...]

Crossing the Threshold: Families in poverty no longer paying state income tax

An interesting new report from our friends at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities looks at whether families with income below the federal poverty level (FPL) in each state are subject to state income taxes. It finds that for… Read more [More...]

State revenues: The storm may be subsiding but the forecast remains bleak

The latest monthly budget release (PDF) from Treasurer Scott Meacham provided some good news and some bad news. The bad news is that October revenues fell well short of projections, as they have in each month of the current fiscal… Read more [More...]

Stimulus reporting–more dead trees don’t help you see the forest

There’s been a lot of news about stimulus reporting the last few weeks. A lot of it has focused on jobs created or saved; that’s understandable since that was a major point of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which… Read more [More...]

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...]