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Want to improve reentry outcomes? Raise the minimum wage
A person working a full-time job at Oklahoma’s current minimum wage – $7.25 per hour – earns below the federal poverty level for a single person. Raising the minimum wage will improve the economic prospects for hundreds of thousands of Oklahomans and their families, and it will specifically help improve the outcomes for the thousands of people leaving Oklahoma’s prisons each year. [Cole Allen / OK Policy]
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Oklahoma should not deny transgender people medically necessary care (Capitol Update)
Senate Bill 904, a carryover bill from 2025 that started as amendments to an incentive reimbursement program for long-term care facilities, was plucked from obscurity recently, gutted, and turned into a bill denying Medicaid (SoonerCare) coverage “for any gender transition procedures, regardless of whether the procedures are provided to a minor or an adult.” The bill passed the Senate on March 25 and the House last Wednesday. It’s headed to the governor to certainly become law. I have to say, I simply do not understand the obsession with singling out transgender Oklahomans and denying them treatments they need and would otherwise qualify to receive under Medicaid. [Steve Lewis / Capitol Update]
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Policy Matters: Lawmakers say public schools matter. Their policies say otherwise
Oklahoma lawmakers talk about how much they care about education. They claim teachers should be paid better. They promise that students come first. But when it’s time to act, the message starts to shift. While they say public education matters, most voted to hand over hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars to wealthy parents who can already afford private schools. They claim they’re supporting teachers, but then pass measures like Senate Joint Resolution 39 that weaken local school funding. [Shiloh Kantz / The Journal Record]
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SQ 832: Fate of minimum wage hike in the hands of Oklahoma voters: Oklahoma last raised its minimum wage in 2009, when it matched the new federal rate that took effect that year. While efforts to raise it since then have failed in the Oklahoma Legislature, this time around, the decision will be left to voters when State Question 832 appears on the June 16 ballot. [NonDoc]
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"These findings show what many working Oklahomans already know: hard work doesn’t always mean you can make ends meet. Thousands of Oklahomans are working long hours in restaurants, stores and other jobs that keep our communities running, but many are still being illegally underpaid. No one with a full-time job should have to struggle to get by."
- Gabriela Ramirez-Perez, Economic Security and Immigration Policy Analyst for OK Policy, responding to a report from the Workplace Justice Lab. The report revealed that tens of thousands of Oklahomans are illegally paid below the minimum wage, earning an average of just $5 per hour. [Workplace Justice Lab]
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SQ 832 ($15/hr Minimum Wage)
In 2024, an initiative petition campaign for State Question 832 gathered more than enough signatures for a ballot measure to raise Oklahoma’s minimum wage, currently at $7.25/hr and unchanged since 2009.
The ballot measure was designed to increase the state minimum wage to $9 per hour in 2025, $10.50 per hour in 2026, $12 per hour in 2027, $13.50 per hour in 2028, and $15 per hour in 2029. Beginning in 2030, the wage would be adjusted based on changes to inflation.
State officials certified the signatures for SQ 832 too late put the issue on the November 2024 general election ballot. In September 2024, Gov. Stitt signed an Executive Order to delay a vote on SQ 832 until the June 2026 primary election. The Executive Order stated that if the initiative is approved, the minimum wage would not be increased in 2025 or 2026 but would increase to $12 per hour on January 1, 2027.
For more information on this state question, visit OK Policy’s SQ 832: Minimum Wage Increase | Information and Resources page.
[Look up more key terms to understand Oklahoma politics and government here]
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Opinion: Taking affordability seriously: Even with recent oil shocks, affordability remains mostly an issue of incomes, not prices
Affordability has been the policy buzzword of recent years. Much of the affordability discourse—both among policymakers and the public—has focused near-exclusively on prices as the big affordability problem. But affordability is not a problem of high prices, instead it’s the outcome of a race between incomes and prices. And the reason typical families have faced an affordability crunch in recent decades is not because prices have grown exceptionally fast, it’s because incomes for the vast majority have grown too slowly. This income growth has been suppressed mostly by rising inequality that has put a growing wedge between overall economic growth and the income growth of typical families.
Getting the drivers of affordability right is important—it’s not just quibbling. If you only examine price growth and try to infer what has happened to affordability over periods of economic history, you’ll usually get the story wrong. And if policymakers only look at how to change the trajectory of prices while ignoring what they can do to change the trajectory of incomes, they will be far less effective in providing useful relief to U.S. families. There are far more ways to use policy to raise incomes in a targeted and effective way than there are to suppress price growth.
Below, we provide some more background on why analyses of affordability need to include incomes, why policymakers have much more scope to raise incomes in a useful way as opposed to pushing down prices, and why focusing just on prices can obscure whether affordability has improved or worsened.
[Josh Bivens / Economic Policy Institute]
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1,867 - The number of people reported experiencing homelessness during Oklahoma City’s 2026 Point In Time count, which provides an annual snapshot of homelessness in Oklahoma City. While this overall count was 15 fewer than last year, the Point In Time count showed increases in several demographic categories, including families, unaccompanied youth, and people experiencing chronic homelessness. [2026 OKC Point-In-Time Count / Key to Home Partnership]
30% - After the longest stretch in U.S. history without a federal minimum wage increase, the minimum wage today is worth about 30% less than it was 15 years ago, once inflation is taken into account. [Economic Policy Institute]
$109 million - Between 2010 and 2024, an average of 28,000 Oklahomans a year were illegally paid below the minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. Workers who were paid below the minimum wage during this period lost an average of more than $3,800 a year, or 30 percent of their earned wages. In total, working Oklahomans lost an estimated average of roughly $109 million a year from being paid below the minimum wage, totaling $1.6 billion over the 15-year study period. [Workplace Justice Lab]
84% - The share of eligible Oklahomans who participated in SNAP in 2020, before the pandemic. With eligibility changes and new work reporting requirements on the horizon, participation could fall sharply, putting food assistance out of reach for many people who qualify for help. [Center on Budget and Policy Priorities]
$1 in every $5 - Medicaid accounts for nearly 20% of all U.S. health care spending and is one of the largest sources of federal funding flowing into states. Major cuts to the program, including expansion, could leave states facing massive fiscal shortfalls and strain health systems that rely on that funding. [KFF]
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What Would It Take to End Homelessness in America?: Every year, typically at the end of January, teams of canvassers conduct a vital survey to count the number of people experiencing homelessness in America. This survey informs the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)’s Annual Homelessness Assessment Report to Congress. It includes Point-in-Time (PIT) estimates of the number of people who, on a single night, are staying in emergency shelters, transitional housing, safe havens, or unsheltered locations across the country. The numbers are daunting, but experts believe it is possible to end this situation in the U.S.—and a growing body of research shows what it would take to do it. [Bloomberg School of Public Health / Johns Hopkins University]
Most minimum wage studies have found little or no job loss: There is always a great deal of political heat around minimum wage increases, largely driven by concerns about job losses. After a minimum wage increase, the story goes, many employers will not be able to afford to pay their workers the new higher minimum wage and will therefore shrink their payrolls. If these job losses are large enough, they could even swamp the higher wages and lead to lower overall wage income for the entire group of affected workers. Yet actual evidence shows that this narrative is largely wrong. The vast majority of minimum wage research implies that minimum wage policies have unambiguously raised the total earnings of low-wage workers. [Economic Policy Institute]
Minimum Wage Violations in Oklahoma, 2010-2024: Every year, tens of thousands of Oklahomans go to work and don’t get paid what they’re owed. This report estimates that an average of more than 28,000 Oklahomans a year were illegally paid below the minimum wage between 2010 and 2024. Although Oklahoma has its own minimum wage law, it exempts the vast majority of employers from coverage because it excludes anyone covered under the federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). This makes the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour—a rate that has not been updated since 2009—the effective floor for most workers in the state. [Workplace Justice Lab]
SNAP Cuts in One Big Beautiful Bill Act Leave Almost 3 Million Young Adults Vulnerable to Losing Nutrition Assistance: The expansion of work-reporting requirements and removal of key exemptions under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act will leave nearly 3 million young adults vulnerable to food insecurity by tightening access to Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Simultaneously, caps on benefit growth and increased state cost-sharing mean fewer safeguards during rising food prices and more pressure on state systems. To reduce harm, policymakers should ensure that young adults facing employment instability retain access, streamline verification, and clearly explain exemption options. [Urban Institute]
Medicaid Financing: The Basics: States are facing substantial Medicaid financing changes and historic reductions in federal funding following the passage of the 2025 reconciliation law, though the timing of the changes and the impacts vary by state. In addition, administrative actions related to financing and more aggressive oversight of potential fraud by health care providers, including withholding federal Medicaid operating funds, contribute to fiscal uncertainty for states. Amid federal policy changes, states are also experiencing a more tenuous fiscal climate due to slowing revenue growth and increasing spending demands. Medicaid is often central to state budget decisions as it is simultaneously a significant spending item as well as the largest source of federal revenues for states. [KFF]
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What’s up this week at Oklahoma Policy Institute? The Weekly Wonk shares our most recent publications and other resources to help you stay informed about Oklahoma. Numbers of the Day and Policy Notes are from our daily news briefing, In The Know.
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Contact
Oklahoma Policy Institute
907 S. Detroit Ave #1005
Tulsa, OK 74120
United States
918-794-3944 | info@okpolicy.org
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