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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.
OK Policy Director David Blatt’s Journal Record column explained how help is coming for tens of thousands of Oklahomans desperately in need of health insurance. David was also quoted in an Oklahoman article discussing the ongoing debate regarding tax breaks for horizontal drilling.
On our blog we discussed how calculations of how much income it takes to make ends meet reveal why many hard-working families still need a boost in today’s economy and shared maps showing the geography of race and poverty in Oklahoma City and Tulsa from 1980 to 2010. We also discussed why black Oklahomans are arrested for marijuana possession at a much higher rate than white Oklahomans and reran a blog that showed per pupil spending in the state has dropped significantly since FY 2008.
- 1.96 billion – Gallons of gasoline used in Oklahoma in 2010
- 72.5% – Percentage of full-time, year-round Oklahoma workers with health insurance reporting ‘excellent’ or ‘very good’ health, versus just 58.0% for those without insurance
- 8.5% – Unemployment rate for Oklahomans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, compared to 5.2% state unemployment overall in 2012
- 180,559 – The number of K-12 children in Oklahoma that are responsible for taking care of themselves after school, 29% of the state’s kids
- 4th – Oklahoma’s rank nationally for the share of households in which someone went hungry during the year because they could not afford enough food, 2011
Policy Notes
- The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities explained why U.S. anti-poverty programs have an impressive record of achievement.
- The Economic Policy Institute shared ten charts that illustrate points made in President Obama’s recent speech about the state of the economy.
- Economist Spencer England showed that the data does not support the argument that the Affordable Care Act is causing a significant shift of employees from full-time to part-time.
- The Open Society Foundation explains why we should end the mandatory detention of immigrants without a hearing.
- Stateline explained how states opting out of Medicaid expansion stand to lose millions in payments to offset the cost of caring for some of the sickest state prison inmates.
