The Heartland Institute

With no-fault auto insurance premiums that are among the highest in the nation, Michigan lawmakers should act to grant consumers more choice and to control the sky-rocketing cost of medical claims, a new policy study from the R Street Institute finds. The report from R Street Senior Fellow R. J. Lehmann comes on the heels ...

In 1998, Florida and Nevada had the same score on the National Assessment of Educational Progress fourth grade reading test. In 1999, however, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) instituted a series of reforms, including tax-credit scholarships, vouchers, grading schools from A-F, ending social promotion from third grade, a robust system ...

Steve Stanek speaks about the Marketplace Fairness Act on the Nationally Syndicated Lars Larson Show. ...

Friday's ed news 1. Alabama withdrew from Common Core testing recently, but state legislators say that's not enough. They want the entire program out . 2. If teachers like unions so much, writes Larry Sand , why do unions bully them into joining? 3. A suburban Minneapolis school district will save $2 million in two years by ...

The New Hampshire legislature voted its first private school choice program into law in 2011, but a new majority in the state House of Representatives may now repeal it. In addition, the program is facing a lawsuit. “A number of [education] tax-credit programs have never been challenged in court, [such as those in] Florida ...

As President Obama’s health care law goes into effect, restaurants across the country are preparing for the new expense of meeting informational requirements under the law which are likely to prove costly without any certainty of health benefits. Section 4205 of Obama’s law requires restaurants and similar retail food establishments ...

Over the past few years many states have passed so-called Amazon taxes that have produced very little revenue and in some cases have been overturned in court. At the same time Congress has tried to expand states' ability to tax purchases made online and from mail-order catalogs by neutering the physical presence standard. Only ...

Global warming alarmists are attacking the integrity of scientists, desperately seeking to minimize the damage presented by a recent survey of geoscientists and engineers regarding global warming. A recent survey of more than 1,000 geoscientists and engineers reported in the peer-reviewed Organization Studies found that only 36 percent ...

Florida Governor Rick Scott has decided to go along with the Obama administration's expansion of Medicaid, the most significant state under Republican control to do so. Peter Suderman explains the background: It’s a dramatic reversal for Scott, a former health care executive and outspoken opponent of ObamaCare who spent an estimated ...

How would they likely compare with the region’s winter wheat yields of today? Based on the results of this study, the net effect of several warmth-induced changes induces a mean grain yield increase of 16.3%... Read More A Two-Millennia Record of the South American Summer Monsoon (19 Feb 2013) Today’s temperatures over the ...

Capital gains tax rates in the United States, which were raised in January, are now among the highest in the world, causing a drain on the economy and putting the U.S. economy at a competitive disadvantage, according to a new analysis by the Tax Foundation. “As Congress begins debating tax reform, members need to take a ...

Government biofuel programs are causing the destruction of America’s grasslands, scientists report in a newly published study in the peer-reviewed Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . Spurred on by biofuel programs, America’s grasslands are disappearing at a pace comparable to deforestation rates in Brazil, Malaysia ...

The Board of Governors of Florida’s Citizens Property Insurance Corp. has voted to transfer $30 billion of hurricane exposure from the state-run insurer to Florida-based Weston Insurance Co. Weston will accept 23,000 personal residential wind-only policies, 5,000 commercial nonresidential wind-only policies, and 3,000 commercial residential ...

Obsolete thinking and rear-view-mirror analysis comprise Professor Susan Crawford’s new book Captive Audience — the Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age . Unfortunately, the only “gilded” thing in this book is the analysis with fool’s gold. Obviously nostalgic for the simpler government-controlled times of long ...

Idaho Gov. Butch Otter’s conversion from bellicose health-care rebel to boisterous lobbyist for one of the law’s critical elements—creation of a health insurance exchange as mandated by President Obama’s health care law—signals nothing less than a seismic shift for the gregarious Republican governor. In January’s State of the State ...

Microlearning may be an unfamiliar term, but you’ve probably done it. Find out what it means, and how it relates to the universe of online learning, learning games, and education apps with Greg Drukala, co-founder and chief engineer of KnowledgeFox. He and School Reform News Managing Editor Joy Pullmann discuss how adults ...

Gussie Lorenzo-Luaces and three classmates at Deer Park Elementary in Tampa, Florida wanted to find what sort of paper allows a paper airplane to fly the farthest. After five trial runs, they determined copy paper, with its smooth surface and stable weight, worked best. The boys’ exhibit was among more than 1,800 presented ...

As states implement the federal health care law, many are debating whether to expand their Medicaid programs in order to receive a larger federal subsidy. North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory recently announced, “North Carolina is not ready to expand the Medicaid system,” and that may be the best decision for state taxpayers. If ...

The latest research from the Employment Benefits Research Institute shows that health savings accounts, a key feature of consumer driven health plans, continue to grow in popularity despite the Obama Administration's attempts to shortchange them. Here's the new research from EBRI: Almost 70 percent of workers with an HRA or HSA ...

The Antarctic ice cap is not shrinking despite alarmist claims to the contrary, scientists report in the peer-reviewed science journal The Cryosphere . Moreover, the scientists report “a clear increase in accumulation of more than 10% has occurred in high SMB (surface mass balance) coastal regions and over the highest part of ...