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 Education: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom,” such claims are unfounded.

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.

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 is particularly significant for Oklahoma.

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

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.

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.

It takes 18 Oklahomans in the private sector to fund one Oklahoma state government job.