OKPOLICY.ORG
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 at OK Policy, we review the tax credits and exemptions that were added or extended this session, despite the Governor’s expressed commitment to eliminate tax credits that do not create jobs. Yesterday’s post, Falling Unemployment: Are workers getting jobs or getting discouraged? uses two alternative indicators of unemployment in Oklahoma to gauge the health of the state’s job market.
Sweeping changes to the nation’s health care system were enacted in recent years and talk of even more changes continues to reverberate in debates over the federal budget. Central to the discussion and always a lightning rod in health care debates is the future of Medicare. Read Wednesday’s post to find out what is changing with respect to Medicare. Lastly, in Hunger doesn’t take a summer break we highlight the importance of access to the federal Summer Food Service Program (SFSP) for low-income children.
Also this week, The Tulsa World spoke with OK Policy Director David Blatt on a dispute over how much the expansion of Medicaid benefits under health reform will cost the state.
In the Know, Policy Notes
- State and local government job losses have topped half a million since the recession began
- Dana Goldstein finds several new studies that question the usefulness of evaluating teachers solely with student test results
- Courts are joining state budget battles as they find many states are not meeting their responsibilities to local governments, schoolchildren and prisoners
- Bruce Bartlett shows that Europeans do not pay substantially higher taxes than Americans when you account for the decrease in American wages due to health insurance premiums that Europeans pay through taxes
- The New York Times reports that despite public hostility to the idea from Governor Perry, behind the scenes Texas is planning for an insurance exchange
- 57.6 – Average age of an Oklahoma farm operator, 2007
- 5 – Number of state agencies receiving more appropriations in FY ‘12 than in FY ’09; the other 74 agencies will receive less
- 78,787 – Total rounds of golf played in 2010 at state-owned golf courses in Oklahoma
- 51.3 percent – Percentage of married-couple families in Oklahoma where both spouses work
- $2,503 – Average monthly cost per person for stay in an assisted living facility in Oklahoma, 2009
