The Weekly Wonk: March 24, 2013

The Weekly Wonk is a summary of Oklahoma Policy Institute’s events, publications, blog posts, and coverage.  Numbers of the Day and Policy Notes are from our daily news briefing, In The Know.  Click here to subscribe to In The Know.

This week we released criminal justice reform recommendations aimed at improving a system in crisis, while maintaining a fiscally responsible state budget. The OKPolicy Blog shared a personal story from a young mother trying to live on minimum wage in Oklahoma. 

We also blogged this week about why accepting federal dollars to extend Medicaid would help Oklahoma veterans and how a bill to move all Soonercare recipients into managed care would return the state to a model that was already tried and failed in the 1990s.

David Blatt wrote in the Journal Record that there are signs the revenue growth prediction for next year may be too optimistic.  Listen to our director on Oklahoma Voices speaking at a recent conference sponsored by Phillips Theological Seminary.

Policy Notes

• CNN explored the precarious employment situations of LGBT workers in Mississippi, a state that ties with Oklahoma for having the fewest protections for LGBT people.
• Salon examines the widespread mistreatment of restaurant workers in the United States.
• The American Prospect finds that the United States stands almost alone in not guaranteeing workers paid time-off when they are sick, but momentum is building around the country to change that. 
• Atlantic Cities shows that the rise of charter schools is causing enrollment in private schools to fall. 
• The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities released a new report showing that in the past five years, almost every state has made severe cuts to higher education funding.  

Numbers of the Day

• 16.6 percent – Percentage of Oklahomans aged 50–64 who have no health insurance, compared to just 11.3 percent nationally
• 121,840 – The number of Oklahoma children living in working families earning below the poverty level, 15.3 percent of the state’s kids
• 15.2% – Percentage of student loans that were delinquent in Oklahoma in the fourth quarter of 2012, compared to 9.7 percent nationally.
• 19,244 – Number of Hispanic Oklahomans living in non-urban counties, nearly a third of the population of the state’s rural/mixed-rural counties (64,958) in 2011
• 35 percent – Percentage of people receiving income-based government assistance in Oklahoma that live with a disability, compared to 30 percent nationally in 2011