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 OK Policy explained the huge variety of critical public structures funded by Oklahoma’s income tax. We released a statement on the troubling new details inside Governor Fallin’s tax reform proposal. We also released an animated video evaluating the economic performance of Oklahoma vs. Texas – the state with an income tax is winning. The video was posted by Reuters and StateImpact OK and re-blogged by OkieBrent and Alternative Tulsa.
We gave you five reasons we shouldn’t be drug-testing welfare applicants. Guest blogger John Thompson discussed the impact of Oklahoma’s No Child Left Behind waiver on urban schools. Our work on tax reform proposals appeared in both the Tulsa World and NewsOK.
In The Know, Policy Notes
- NewsOK explores how family poverty contributes to high dropout rates in south Oklahoma City.
- The Economic Policy Institute discusses how proliferating unpaid internships damage the labor market and allow corporations to dodge taxes.
- New Deal 2.0 explains how women’s access to contraception has benefited the economy.
- The Center for Children and Families shows that the federal Children’s Health Insurance Program has enabled the lowest uninsured rate for children ever recorded.
- The Annie E. Casey Foundation released a data snapshot that tracks the number of children residing in areas of concentrated poverty between 2000 and 2010.
- 96, 748 – The number of low-income households in Oklahoma who pay more than half of their monthly income on housing.
- $158 million – Amount of additional money requested by State Superintendent Janet Barresi to fund common education in 2013. Gov. Fallin’s budget allocates $0 additional dollars.
- 6.8 percent – Growth rate of clean energy jobs between 1998 and 2007, compared to 2.4 percent growth for all jobs.
- $31 – The annual extra premium cost of adding a young adult to an employee’s family plan in Oklahoma.
- 3rd – Oklahoma’s rank nationally for the number of adults and teens who smoke, 2010
