Budget & Tax, Health Care

We won't stop

June 30, 2020

Jonathan Small

Here come the tax increases. Today, California labor unions swooped in and convinced barely half of Oklahoma's voters to put the last optional piece of Nancy Pelosi’s Obamacare scheme into our state’s Constitution.

Now begins the buildup to the unrelenting pressure lawmakers at the Oklahoma Capitol will soon face to impose higher taxes yet again on their constituents back home. Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion will cost our state up to $374 million extra each year, just to get those almighty federal dollars with Speaker Pelosi’s strings attached.

With oil prices still depressed and the response to Covid-19 continuing to wreak economic havoc, it’s easy to anticipate next year another billion-dollar budget shortfall for state government, which Medicaid expansion will only worsen.

It will be all but impossible for state lawmakers to cover that gap without cutting other services, like public education and road maintenance, or raising taxes. Just two years ago, facing a similar shortfall, the Legislature banded together in a bipartisan fashion to pass the largest package of tax increases in state history. Here we go again.

If Oklahoma taxpayers don’t want to endure another shakedown in 2021, we need to start communicating to our legislators immediately that tax increases are unacceptable. OCPA won't stop fighting for Oklahoma taxpayers. Be on the look out in the coming days to join the fight to refuse tax increases.