The Weekly Wonk: July 13, 2012

What’s up this week at Oklahoma Policy Institute? The Weekly Wonk is dedicated to this week’s events, publications, and blog posts.

This week the OK Policy Blog explained why welfare as most people imagine it doesn’t actually exist anymore, and children are bearing the brunt.  We predicted that federal intervention on Oklahoma’s health insurance exchange now seems inevitable.  Former Senate President Cal Hobson wrote a guest blog about why the Legislature’s blanket opposition to bond issues is unwise.

David Blatt wrote in the Journal Record that the falling state workforce is a recipe for disaster.  We blogged about the details of the 2012 Oklahoma Suicide Prevention Conference next Friday, July 20^th in Norman.

In The Know, Policy Notes

• The Center for Voting and Democracy ranked Oklahoma last in a 50-state ‘Democracy Index,’ which measured the competitiveness of elections, how well the intent of the electorate is reflected by results, and voter participation.
• Matthew Yglesias shows that many business owners and politicians who say that allowing some tax cuts to expire will harm the economy are bizarrely uninformed about how the tax code actually works.
• The Center for American Progress compiled the latest and most essential facts about immigration in our nation today.
• Wonkblog examines how hospitals will lose funds to cover uncompensated care if the state opts out of the Medicaid expansion.
• The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities examines why the war on poverty is unfinished.

Numbers of the Day

• $37.5 billion – Total federal spending in Oklahoma, 2010
• 50.5 percent – Percentage of Oklahoma’s land area that has experienced severe, extreme, or exceptional drought since the start of the year, 2012
• $914 – Per-capita gambling revenues in Oklahoma, 3rd highest in the country in 2010
• 1^st – Oklahoma’s rank nationally for the rate we incarcerate drug offenders, comprising 27 percent of the state’s prison population in 2009
• $7,000 – Maximum a family of three can earn for an adult to be eligible for Medicaid in Oklahoma; healthy working-age adults without dependent children are ineligible for Medicaid at any income