A review of some of our tax breaks is needed, but legislators want to keep riding the same high hog

BY ARNOLD HAMILTON

By the time you're reading this, state lawmakers should be nearly finished plugging the holes in Oklahoma's Ship of State, keeping it afloat financially through the final four months of the 2010 fiscal year.

The governor, the House speaker and the Senate president pro tem used spending cuts, federal stimulus dollars and Rainy Day funds to patch a hull mangled by the world's worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, collapsing oil and gas tax revenues and nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars in foolhardy tax cuts.

As complex and intense as those decisions were, however, it wasn't the fiscal triage that Oklahoma really needs--or deserves.

It's time--way past time, actually--that Oklahomans engage in a serious, selfless debate over tax policy, specifically the corporate welfare that lawmakers routinely dole out in a state that nonetheless fancies itself as a bastion of free market capitalism.

New research by the non-partisan Oklahoma Policy Institute (okpolicy.org) identified more than 450 tax breaks in state law, carving a breathtaking $5.6 billion--yes, billion--in potential revenues from the state's budget.

That's darn near as much as the entire state budget in recent fiscal years.

Some of the breaks--such as homestead exemption and standard deduction--benefit taxpayers across the economic spectrum. But an increasing number of lawmakers are concerned many of the business incentives are of dubious value--nothing more than a legal looting of the state treasury.

Imagine what Oklahoma would look like if state lawmakers weren't compulsively rewarding their well-heeled campaign donors with corporate welfare.

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