As oil and banking mogul George Kaiser explained a few weeks ago, one of the main reasons Oklahoma finds itself in a seemingly endless budget crisis is that our elected officials refuse to reasonably and responsibly tax our state's most valuable resource - hydrocarbons. It's a point we've been making at the TLO Home Office since 2014.
Although there was a popular push to raise the gross production tax to the same rates as other energy-producing states, our greedy, profit-driven Oil Industry Overlords and the legislative loyalists they control successfully defeated the effort, only agreeing to an increased tax on depleted wells that were drilled between 2011 - 2015. Basically, they agreed to a one-time revenue source increase that does nothing to address or avoid future revenue crisis.