The Heartland Institute

Joy Pullman, Research Fellow of Education Policy at the Heartland Institute, discusses an Indiana Senate hearing on the common core. ...

House Bill 1003 would lift a spending cap on Indiana’s voucher program and ditch a requirement that students attend public school for a year before becoming eligible. Although the program currently pays up to 90 percent of a high school student’s tuition, it limits the voucher to $4,500 for those in grades two through eight ...

As states begin implementing provisions of the federal health care law, many, such as Montana, are still debating whether to expand their Medicaid programs in order to receive a larger federal subsidy. If Montana expands its Medicaid program to individuals at 100 to 138 percent of the federal poverty level, the federal government ...

Younger Americans not only take on relatively more credit card debt than their elders, they are also paying it off at a slower rate, according to a first-of-its-kind study. The findings suggest younger generations may continue to add credit card debt into their 70s and die still owing money on their cards. “If what we found ...

So that Medicaid expansion – it’s very tempting, isn’t it? All those Medicaid dollars just sitting there, free of charge from the federal coffers … and you get to claim you’ve expanded coverage for hundreds of thousands of people in an instant, at no cost to the state. It all sounds too good to be true. That’s because ...

Problem In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), also known as Obamacare, states must now decide whether to expand their Medicaid programs by accepting a larger federal subsidy. As passed, PPACA required states to expand their Medicaid eligibility to all individuals ...

Illinois has not paid what it owes its five pensions systems, and it’s unlikely lawmakers will want to pay any more than they have to in the future. “One-hundred-percent funding is impossible,” said state Sen. Pam Althoff (R-Crystal Lake). “As much as anyone would like to fully fund the pension systems, it is just not practical ...

President Barack Obama in his second inauguration address called for new action to “respond to the threat of climate change,” saying “none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms.” Imposing still more “global warming” restrictions on the U.S. economy makes about as much ...

Ronald Reagan once said, “A government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth.” If he were alive today, Reagan would probably be pleasantly surprised to discover not all federal enterprises are immortal—among them the recently terminated Transaction Account Guarantee (TAG) program. Created as ...

Common Core State Standards for K-12 schools were adopted without debate by every state but Alaska, Nebraska, Texas, and Virginia in 2010, part of the price of getting federal dollars under the Obama administration’s “Race to the Top” program. Now educators, parents, and policymakers are taking a closer look at what they agreed ...

The implementation of a new and controversial piece of legislation, which critics say would damage the fragile U.S. economy and negatively impact the seven million American expats around the world, is “losing momentum,” according to the boss of the world’s largest independent financial advisory firm. The comments from Nigel Green ...

A group of prison inmates in Idaho is suing major beer companies, alleging the brewers are responsible for their lives of crime. One of the prisoners killed a man five years ago. Two others were convicted of grand theft and drug violations. All of the plaintiffs claim they didn’t know alcohol is addictive and habit-forming ...

The billions of dollars a dozen financial institutions recently agreed to pay to settle government complaints over banking and mortgage lending practices come with a twist: The financial institutions likely will receive billions of dollars of tax deductions. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) sent a letter to federal financial regulators ...

Vocabulary is vital to learning in every subject, studies show. To get a more accurate view of U.S. students’ vocabulary, the National Center for Education Statistics adapted its vocabulary and reading comprehension assessment in 2009. The second round of results shows U.S. students have only a mediocre vocabulary. Vocabulary ...

The State Teacher Policy Yearbook provides detailed analysis of any and every state policy that impacts the teaching profession. The Yearbook is a 52-volume encyclopedia (51 state reports including the District of Columbia plus a national summary) produced every other year, measuring states' policies against a realistic blueprint ...

James McGill Buchanan Jr. died Wednesday, January 9, 2013 in Blacksburg, Virginia. In 1986 he won the Nobel Prize in economics mainly for establishing the public choice school of economics. I was a student at his graduate seminar in public choice at University of California-Los Angeles when he was visiting professor in the ...

In 2007, University of Pennsylvania Professor J. Scott Armstrong’s attention was drawn to former VP Gore’s concerns about global warming. Having spent five decades studying the science of forecasting, Armstrong decided to examine the basis for the forecasts of global warming. He was unable to find a single scientific forecast ...

Global warming alarmists and skeptics alike report Heartland Institute Senior Fellow James M. Taylor scored a decisive victory over Ray Bellamy, an official presenter for Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project, in a global warming debate in Tallahassee, Florida. “A number of attendees had their viewpoint about climate change not being ...

Author and consultant Larry Downes discusses his latest paper, "A Rational Response to the Privacy ‘Crisis.’" ...

Germany's central bank plans to bring back to Germany almost 700 tons of gold reserves it keeps in New York and Paris. By 2020, half of its gold bars will be in its vaults, the Deutsche Bundesbank said in its January 16 announcement. It currently keeps less than a third at home. The bars were originally taken out of ...