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"My sister-in-law came to visit me last week from her new home in Silver Spring, Maryland," World magazine essayist Andrée Seu wrote in November. "When the economy threatened, she left a good job in the private sector in Florida for the greater security of a job with the Department of Veterans Affairs."

It looks like Oklahoma could be back in the chips again. The head of the state's most powerful labor union says that President Obama's "stimulus" plan will free up some funds here in Oklahoma. Hey, that's good to hear.

"Wiped out," huh? Sounds serious.

"The current economic strategy is right out of Atlas Shrugged," our friend Stephen Moore writes today in The Wall Street Journal

"The U.S. and dozens of other nations are returning to massive government spending as a recession fighter," Sudeep Reddy reports today in The Wall Street Journal.

The compensation of Oklahoma’s government employees exceeds that of their private-sector counterparts. But a bigger problem is that we simply have too many government employees in this state: Oklahoma’s ratio of government employment to private-sector employment is a disturbing 5th highest in the country. Bringing this ratio in line with the national average would have saved Oklahoma taxpayers $2.8 billion last year.

The financial markets have taken on a lot of water recently. Congress has been bailing furiously. But are we doing anything to actually fix the leak?

A major industry has gotten in line to receive a bailout. It directly employs more than six million people. That’s a lot of people considering that there are a total of 300 million men, women, and children in the United States, of whom 137 million are currently employed (excluding farmers). So the workers in this industry constitute about four percent of all U.S. workers.

The year 2008 is not the first time our country has faced a debt and mortgage crisis with profound consequences for our freedom—our economic freedom, our political freedom, and even our national freedom.

In FY 2008, Oklahomans paid an estimated $34,569,140,000 in federal, state, and local taxes, such as income taxes, sales taxes, and property taxes, to name just a few.