The Heartland Institute

As observers of Oklahoma’s public-policy scene are keenly aware, the field of workers’ compensation reform is littered with the remains of failed reforms of years past. Why do our efforts to reform the workers’ compensation system repeatedly disappoint? Because we refuse to address the chief structural feature of our system—its ...

In July 2010, the National Education Association (NEA) “decided that $3 million was just the right amount of money to spend in Oklahoma to support SQ 744, a ballot initiative that would have raised per-pupil spending to the regional average,” education reporter Mike Antonucci writes. “However, the union’s best efforts were only ...

One of the sad and dangerous signs of our times,” Thomas Sowell wrote last month, “is how many people are enthralled by words, without bothering to look at the realities behind those words. One of those words that many people seldom look behind is ‘education.’ But education can cover anything from courses on nuclear physics ...

CENTER FOR ECONOMIC FREEDOM Tinkering, Not Right-Sizing Thu, Jun 02, 2011 01:16 PM CDT Spending and Budget Left pulled example --> Longtime conservative activist Howard Phillips has a great line: “Don’t read their lips—read their budgets.” Andrew Spiropoulos, OCPA’s Milton Friedman Distinguished Fellow, puts it this way: “You can ...

With Oklahoma facing budget challenges during this year’s legislative session, higher education appropriations took a 5.8 percent cut. Predictably, this triggered a harsh response from leaders of the state’s universities, who claim that the cut will harm future economic growth. Yet, as we detail in our new report, “Oklahoma Higher ...

It takes 18 Oklahomans in the private sector to fund one Oklahoma state government job. In total, for 2009, there were 86,822 state government workers in Oklahoma. These workers earned $4,231,080,000, or an average of $48,733 on a per-job basis. As a result, it would take a total of 1,521,498 private-sector jobs to fund ...

Oklahoma is fast becoming a national leader in offering families school choice, thanks to its charter schools and the new scholarship program for children with disabilities. Gov. Mary Fallin and schools Superintendent Janet Barresi both support giving families more options. Looking to the future, Oklahoma policymakers should consider ...

Former U.S. Senator Zell Miller, a Georgia Democrat, once noted that “government takes too much from our taxpayers—big and little alike. Federal-state-local taxes come at us from every direction. It’s like a never-ending meteor shower.” As OCPA has pointed out before, meteor showers can sometimes produce so many meteors that it ...

How much should a college education cost? According to the College Board, the average cost of earning a degree at a private, four-year university is now more than $100,000. If tuition prices continue to rise as quickly as they did during the past decade, a college degree will cost more than $200,000 by the time today’s third ...

With April 15 behind us, the dreadful thoughts of taxes will soon fade from memory. Yet personal income taxes are only a small part of the tax load that all Oklahomans must bear. This means that paying taxes is really a year-round affair, which makes understanding the tax burden a difficult task. Building on previous research ...

While the governor and legislature have been strongly focused on the state budget deficit, a recent SoonerPoll found that essentially half of Oklahomans, 49.8 percent, support a proposal to reduce the Oklahoma state income tax rate. The poll found that only 37.4 percent of respondents opposed lowering the income tax rate, while ...

On March 15 in Oklahoma City, the past met the future. Carrying signs that read “Stop the War on Workers,” “Collective Bargaining: Backbone of the Middle Class,” and “Don’t Dismantle Public Education,” hundreds of Oklahoma schoolteachers rallied at the state capitol. They expressed concern over school spending, pension reforms ...

When it comes to equalizing the tax burden for traditional, one-earner families where one spouse chooses to stay home, Oklahoma is a national trendsetter. Economists sometimes speak of “horizontal equity,” meaning that households with the same economic situation should have the same tax burden. But previous OCPA research has shown ...

School vouchers, like the Republican Party, are back in a big way. The question for vouchers, as for the GOP, is: Have they learned their lesson? Just a few years ago, the smart people were declaring vouchers dead. “An Idea Whose Time Has Gone: Conservatives Abandon Their Support for School Vouchers” declared the headline ...

Moody’s Investors Service recently made a major change in how it will calculate a state’s credit rating. Oklahoma policymakers should take notice. 1 In a nutshell, Moody’s will now include a state’s unfunded pension liability, along with the traditional net tax-supported debt, when determining a state’s credit rating. This change ...

Recent news reports informed us the U.S. Postal Service lost $8.5 billion last year. Another informed us that a postal workers’ union had to extend its election deadline because thousands of ballots … got lost in the mail. We laugh, but we shouldn’t be surprised. Create a heavily unionized, government-owned, government-operated ...

Around America, the month of January saw a dramatic surge of school choice proposals in at least four states, programs designed actually to empower parents in deed, not merely in rhetorical flourishes. On January 11 in Pennsylvania, the Keystone State, Senators Anthony H. Williams (a Democrat) and Jeffrey E. Piccola (a Republican ...

Oklahoma public schools that violate the civil rights of students risk losing federal education funds, U.S. Department of Education official Jim Bradshaw told CapitolBeatOK recently. That information may be of particular interest to advocates of, and families with, special-needs schoolchildren—the beneficiaries of a new state law ...

Here’s an eye-opening school statistic for you: Only half of Oklahoma’s public education employees are teachers. The bureaucracy is now so big, it takes up half the system. It’s the blob that ate the schools. Teachers’ unions, and the lousy teachers they protect, have become the central villain in the epic drama of education ...