By:
David Blatt
November 12, 2009 // Updated: May 2, 2019
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…
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By:
David Blatt
November 11, 2009 // Updated: May 1, 2019
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…
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By:
Paul Shinn
November 9, 2009 // Updated: May 2, 2019
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…
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By:
David Blatt
November 5, 2009 // Updated: May 2, 2019
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…
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By:
David Blatt
November 3, 2009 // Updated: May 2, 2019
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…
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By:
Paul Shinn
October 27, 2009 // Updated: May 2, 2019
In October, federal agencies, grantees, and contractors who are getting some of the stimulus (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act or ARRA) money are required to submit six month reports. This post points you to places you can see reports or…
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By:
David Blatt
October 14, 2009 // Updated: May 1, 2019
Yesterday’s announcement of state revenue collections for September marked the end of a truly dismal quarter. Collections for the 1st quarter of FY ’10 were 29.5 percent below the first three months of FY ’09. The graph below shows that…
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By:
David Blatt
October 13, 2009 // Updated: May 2, 2019
Are tax breaks for businesses a legitimate tool of economic development, or a form of corporate welfare? The fact is they can be either. The challenge is telling the two apart and ensuring through clear legislative language and ongoing oversight…
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By:
Paul Shinn
October 8, 2009 // Updated: May 1, 2019
Today we released our long-awaited Online Budget Guide, a comprehensive resource exploring how Oklahoma’s state and local government collect and spend money to provide public services. While the Guide is packed full of facts and figures and works as both…
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Oklahoma Policy Institute’s Online Budget Guide, a comprehensive look at how Oklahoma state and local governments raise money and provide public services, is now fully available. The Online Budget Guide adds to available information on Oklahoma’s fiscal picture in several…
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