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David Blatt of the Oklahoma Policy Institute Describes Our State's Massive Budget Gap

Aired on Thursday, January 7th.

As 2016 gets underway, the most vexing question confronting Oklahoma legislators, policymakers, and various state agency heads is...how will the Sooner State solve the glaring budget hole that Oklahomans will face this year -- and next year. State Finance Director Preston Doerflinger has declared a "revenue failure" for this year, resulting in a 3% cut to all state budgets funded by General Revenue -- and the preliminary projection of revenue for next year sees a shortfall of $900 million out of an approximately $7 billion state budget. Our guest on ST is economist David Blatt, executive director of the nonprofit Oklahoma Policy Institute; he's been warning that the state has built a structural deficit into its finances for the past few years now. Blatt offers some ideas for rebuilding the state's finances, and also tells us about an upcoming State Budget Summit -- to be hosted by his organization -- happening on Thursday, January 28th, at the Will Rogers Theater in Oklahoma City. (More details at the OK Policy website.)

Rich Fisher passed through KWGS about thirty years ago, and just never left. Today, he is the general manager of Public Radio Tulsa, and the host of KWGS’s public affairs program, StudioTulsa, which celebrated its twentieth anniversary in August 2012 . As host of StudioTulsa, Rich has conducted roughly four thousand long-form interviews with local, national, and international figures in the arts, humanities, sciences, and government. Very few interviews have gone smoothly. Despite this, he has been honored for his work by several organizations including the Governor's Arts Award for Media by the State Arts Council, a Harwelden Award from the Arts & Humanities Council of Tulsa, and was named one of the “99 Great Things About Oklahoma” in 2000 by Oklahoma Today magazine.
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