In 2006, Oklahomans paid $10,665,186,000 in state and local taxes--including income taxes, sales taxes, property taxes, and more. This is such a mind-bogglingly large number that it might as well be hieroglyphics.
To put this into a more understandable form, let's imagine a typical eight-hour workday and divide that workday into all the major items that Oklahomans pay for in a given year--items such as housing, food, clothing, transportation, and more. The nearby chart shows the proportion of the workday spent working to pay for each of these items.
Disturbingly, Oklahomans spend 173 minutes of every workday laboring to pay their federal, state, and local taxes. This compares to the 150 minutes they work in order to pay for food, clothing, and shelter. In other words, Oklahomans spend more time working to pay their taxes than they do to pay for food, clothing, and shelter combined.
J. Scott Moody (M.A., George Mason University) and Wendy P. Warcholik (Ph.D., George Mason University) are research fellows at the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs (ocpathink.org).
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William - My take on the article is it looks like some kind of press release or under-developed guest column. It's filler copy, in lieu of something developed by the UTW staff. You make interesting points.
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Not sure what the point of this article is? Just about everyone knows that Oklahomans are consistantly ranked as having the lowest of over all tax burdens of any state. Even conservative groups that abhore taxes, who rank the states, rank Oklahoma as one of the lowest, if not the lowest, tax state. If its "disturbing" that we pay the taxes we do, when they are the lowest, I think the authors would be thankful. Perhaps if they are looking at other rankings such as Oklahomans having worse health, higher drug use, high divorce rates, high drop out rates, some of the worst roads, high rates of homelessness, some of the highest rates of hunger, child abuse and neglect, etc. etc. do they find those numbers more pallatable?
Nothing is free.
Just as a people can be taxed too much, it must also be possible that a people can be taxed too little. When people gather together to fix a societies ills, or make an investment, its either going to cost them their money or their time. Both can be effectively or ineffectively spent. But apparently our low tax state status hasn't translated into better time spent. "Theoretically" our lowest in the nation tax burden should be handing us a relative heaven flowing with milk and honey. Right? But the horrible showings in those things listed above, do not bear that out.
Perhaps it would be wiser to not focus solely on ever lower taxes, but focus more on efficiency and results. Less taxes to an inefficient government having programs that deliver poor results will get you even poorer results. Less taxes will not necessarily equate better or more efficient programs. Only better and more efficient programs will do that. Even small towns with very little taxes and a very small government can be poorly run and inefficient. Its not about the size or the amount, the focus should be on the results and what it takes to get them .
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