Oklahoma Makes the Poor Poorer

Sadly it&#x27;s the same story all around the Western world. European governments also pamper to big business by effectively lowering their tax rates in the name of &quot;global competitiveness&quot;, at the same time cutting programs and services that help the poorest make ends meet and give them hope for a better life for their children -- and everywhere, the rhetoric is a variation of &quot;we must cut, we can&#x27;t afford it anymore, there&#x27;s no alternative.&quot;<p>In absolute numbers, Western countries are richer than they ever were and their corporations pay more dividends than ever. Tax cuts for these established companies do nothing to help startups and economic innovation. It&#x27;s the other way around: a welfare state can be a safety net that makes individuals more free to innovate in a free market because the risk of devastating failure is eliminated.

The language of this article is ridiculous. I&#x27;m not sure I even disagree with the author, but the article is full of overly emotionally charged words and extremely obvious bias.<p>Cutting the budget of a social program is not necessarily morally wrong or evil. Especially when the state has a serious deficit and things need to be cut. Budget cuts and tax increases will always be extremely unpopular, but sometimes they may be necessary.

The problem in Oklahoma is that the energy industry is doing poorly, thanks to very low oil and gas prices. Energy is one of the main industries in the state, and a plunge in profits has led directly to the state government&#x27;s $1.3 billion deficit in the current fiscal year. They have no choice but to cut budgets, which include not just the public schools but also the prisons, health, and other departments. It&#x27;s a terrible situation, but budgets need to be balanced.<p>If I would fault the legislature for anything, it&#x27;s that they never take the surpluses during energy boom years and bank them for a rainy day. Energy is cyclical; we&#x27;re currently in a downturn, and in a couple or five years it&#x27;ll be booming again, almost guaranteed. In the good times, you have to save some of the seed corn and not eat it.<p>Governor Bellmon in 1987-1991 instituted higher education budgets, term limits, and other reforms, and tried to persuade the Legislature to save surpluses rather than spend them, to little avail. This is democracy. The people want their pork barrel projects in their towns and counties, and damn the budget. I believe the current governor has also made an effort to take a long term stance on budgets but she does have to deal with the legislature.<p>Just a personal nitpick, as someone who grew up there and still has family there: the fellow who wrote the NY Times article clearly doesn&#x27;t know a whole heck of a lot about Oklahoma but merely cherry-picked this one budget item to paint Oklahomans in general as being unsupportive of education. Well, to some extent it&#x27;s true and the US News rankings put OK at #30 by certain criteria this past year, not great though not the worst either. But I can testify that Oklahomans do take a lot of pride in their schools (even if sometimes it only seems to manifest itself in support for the football teams). When people put down Oklahoma, the image that always comes back to me is the monster tornado that ripped the roof off that school in Moore in 2013, and some of the teachers literally threw themselves on top of their students to protect them with their bodies. Sure, I&#x27;d give these folks a raise; I hope they got one after that storm.

I like EITC, but I find the focus on <i>change</i> in the tax system instead of absolutes to be very short sighted. Where are all the articles complaining that EITC needs to be even higher? Because it strikes me as unlikely that every state already has set the EITC at the perfect level, and so only changes are worth commenting on.<p>Of course it&#x27;s very hard to say from first principles what the tax system should be, but any attempt to do so is going to be worthwhile. The alternative is the implicit position that every single change to the tax system should make it more progressive, (and not make any single person below a certain income worse off).

At the same time London makes richer the rich.

Of course, in the end, it&#x27;s the poor Oklahoman&#x27;s who keep supporting people and policies that make them poor.

Is the EITC even constitutional in the case where somebody receives more money back than they pay in taxes? The federal government has the power to lay taxes, and can reduce those taxes to $0, but a negative tax isn&#x27;t a tax.<p>I can see it if individual states opted into a dedicated income redistribution tax, where the federal government would pool money from any states opting in and redistribute it back to people using the tax mechanisms they already have in place.