Go Vote!

Today is Primary Day for Tulsa municipal offices. Many of the races have only challengers in the primary, so Districts 2, 5, and 8 will be decided today in the primary election.
Polls are open until 7pm and you have, by law, the right to take up to 2 hours off work to go cast your [...]

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Turning the Tide of Childhood Hunger

Last week, the Food Research and Action Center suggested a strategy for ending childhood hunger by 2015, a goal to which President Obama committed during his Presidential campaign. The strategy includes:

Restoring economic growth and creating jobs with better wages for lower-income workers
Raising the incomes of the lowest-income families
Strengthening the SNAP/Food Stamp Program
Strengthening the Child Nutrition [...]

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Getting Behind by Getting Ahead, continued

Last week I linked to an OK Policy post about “cliff effects” that reduce or disqualify people for benefits whenever they increase their earnings, sometimes leaving people even farther behind even as they get better jobs or benefits.
The Associated Press reports that ARRA, the stimulus legislation, is causing some cliff effects of its own, and [...]

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Getting Behind by Getting Ahead

David Blatt at OK Policy does a nice job of explaning the “cliff effect”, whereby people lose important public benefits as their earnings increase. This means that struggling families who manage to raise their incomes face a sort of “tax” on their efforts toward economic self-sufficiency:
The cliff effect is most dramatic for Medicaid health insurance [...]

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The Politics of Oklahoma Education

David Blatt at the Oklahoma Policy Institute details some odd alliances in the Oklahoma legislature over education reform:
But on SB 1111, a bill authored by Sen. Clark Jolley that moves various education reporting and accountability functions from the State Department of Education to the Office of Accountability based with the Regents for Higher Education, it [...]

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April 16 Thursday’s Child Forum

Mark you calendars:

Kids, Families, and Tax Policy:
Best Friends Forever?
 
April 16, 2009
Attend in person in Washington, DC
9 a.m.-10:30 a.m. ET
Urban Institute
2100 M Street N.W., 5th Floor
Register
Listen to a live audio webcast
9 am ET / 8 am CT / 7 am MT / 6 am PT
Program length: 1.5 hours
Register

For many concerned about the well-being of children [...]

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More Okie Wonkery Coming Your Way

The Oklahoma Policy Institute announced the coming launch of their very own blog. Citizens take note: you will have no excuse to lack basic (and thorough!) awareness of the most important policy issues facing our state. That includes this frightening fact: state revenues for February came in 30.4 percent below projections. That’s $104 million that [...]

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Budget Blogging

President Obama released his budget for the 2010 fiscal year. The document is a kind of roadmap for the President’s initiatives over the next several years, but he’s left lots of room to Congress to fill in details.
Anyway, I thought I’d put up some topics of potential interest to our readers:

Early Childhood – The President [...]

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Stimulus on the Radio

If you’re like us and you’re a huge David Blatt fan* (and who isn’t?), you can catch him on the Studio Tulsa replay tonight at 7:30pm on Tulsa’s NPR affiliate, KWGS 89.5.  David will be talking up OK Policy Institute and what Oklahoma can expect to get from the stimulus package. So if you’re sitting [...]

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Stimulus Provision to Benefit 200,000 OK Kids

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has been analyzing the impact of stimulus proposals on low-income families and state budgets. Today they released an estimate of the impact of the proposed child tax credit in the stimulus agreement.
Bottom line: 13 million children nationwide and 200,000 in Oklahoma will benefit from the measure.
The compromise stimulus [...]

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