The Heartland Institute

SPRINGFIELD —Lottery tickets can give 1,000 Chicago kids school choice, one Chicago Democrat says. State Rep. LaShawn Ford (D-Chicago) has introduced legislation that would pull nearly $6 million from the Illinois lottery for K-8 private school “scholarships.” Lawmakers started the lottery in the 1980s to “save” public education ...

Nearly 20 years ago, Coy Koontz Sr., now deceased, sought a permit for four acres of his property in Orange County, Florida to be available for development, so he could sell the property and fund his retirement. The St. Johns River Water Management District responded by demanding Koontz put the rest of his 11 acres of land ...

In fall 2012, the Carolina Business Coalition commissioned us to prepare a review of the North Carolina tax system and recommend possible improvements. We undertook this project as a national organization familiar with tax developments in many states, with the view that tax systems should adhere to sound economic principles, and ...

A jury award in West Virginia will require two lawyers and a doctor to pay CSX Rail $429,240 for racketeering and fraud in the reading of x-rays in asbestos cases. The two attorneys hired the doctor to read tens of thousands of x-rays. One of the lawyers filed 14,000 asbestos claims against the railroad. The doctor’s questionable ...

Did you know that 44 percent of America’s corn crop is used for ethanol production rather than food? Did you know that corn prices and food prices as a whole have increased dramatically during the past several years after federal ethanol mandates began diverting corn to ethanol? The Mackinac Institute’s Bruce Walker published ...

Michael Whatley of the Consumer Energy Alliance talks with Ben Domenech about the Keystone XL pipeline and what to expect from the Obama administration on energy policy. ...

While housing affordability challenges were greatest for extremely low-income (ELI) renters, affordability indicators worsened across the board for renters in the Third Federal Reserve District between 2005 and 2010, according to a study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia’s Community Development Studies Education Department ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...