Guest Blog (Peter Fisher): Everyone pays taxes

Peter Fisher is research director for the Iowa Policy Project, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization founded in 2001 to produce research and analysis to engage Iowans in state policy decisions. This post first appeared on their Policy Points blog and is… Read more [More...]

Trevor Shanklin: Should we increase the tax on alcohol?

Trevor Shanklin recently completed a summer internship at the Oklahoma Policy Institute. He is a decorated disabled veteran of the Oklahoma Army National Guard where he served as a Recruiting and Retention NCO and a Combat Medic with the 1/279… Read more [More...]

Should Oklahoma Raise the Alcoholic Beverage Tax?

Taxes on activities that negatively impact the public good, sometimes known as “sin taxes,” are one form of taxation that has historically received widespread support. An OK Policy issue brief makes the case that increasing Oklahoma’s tax on alcoholic beverages… Read more [More...]

Fearlessly forecasting–into the past

Once again, OK Policy is getting in touch with its inner dweeb (as if the outer dweeb wasn’t scary enough) and beginning work to develop new four-year forecasts of revenue and budgets for the state of Oklahoma. We’ve written elsewhere… Read more [More...]

Why Oklahoma needs an income tax

With the Governor and legislative leaders talking about doing away with Oklahoma’s state income tax, it’s worth taking a look at how the tax affects Oklahomans and why it is important. In an OK Policy fact sheet released today, we… Read more [More...]

Breaking down the debt deal

In this video blog, OK Policy Director David Blatt provides an overview of the deficit reduction agreement reached this summer by Congress and President Obama. The  deal calls for close to $1 trillion in cuts to discretionary programs over the… Read more [More...]

Tax Breaks: Setting out the case for and against

Note: The Task Force for the Study of State Tax Credits and Economic Incentives, created by HB 1285, is meeting over the interim to scrutinize tax credits. This blog post excerpts an OK Policy issue brief from last year titled… Read more [More...]

Preliminary FY 2013 budget outlook shows continued challenges ahead

Oklahoma’s fiscal situation presents an apparent paradox. We have now seen state tax collections rise for five consecutive quarters and exceed prior year collections by 10.5 percent. At the same time, the state budget is still being cut. This year’s… Read more [More...]

Up or down?

The Office of State Finance today released General Revenue collections for July, the first month of FY ’12. Total collections were $385.0 million, which was $14.9 million, or 4.0 percent above July 2010, and $17.0 million, or 4.6 percent, above… Read more [More...]

Weather Break: Understanding the debt ceiling deal

Now that default has been averted and the agreement to raise the federal debt limit has been signed into law, attention here in Oklahoma has shifted, at least temporarily, from politics back to the weather (or, from the debt ceiling… Read more [More...]