The Heartland Institute

Several states across the country are considering increases in their motor fuel taxes to fund repairs and improvements to infrastructure. These taxes, which are paid as an excise duty—a tax on the sale of gasoline and diesel fuel—increase the cost of transportation for individuals. In recent years, however, the rise of fuel ...

Virginia’s Republican governor and Republican-controlled House of Delegates have led lawmakers in approving a $6 billion road building program, virtually twice the size of the highway spending plan the governor had announced barely six weeks earlier. The spending will be paid for almost entirely through tax increases including ...

Problem Maryland has struggled to balance its books in recent years and is barely getting back on its feet after the recession. Payments on state debt are projected to triple between 2007 and 2022. The state spends approximately $12 billion, or one-third of its budget, on elementary, secondary, and higher education, according ...

Ryan Noel just wanted his fellow teachers to see him receive money for his classroom. But teachers union officials in Valley Heights, Kansas barred him from receiving the award at school, because it came from Noel's new, nonunion professional organization, the Kansas Association of American Educators (KANAAE). “Here’s someone ...

In this news story from The Hill , Treasury sectretary nominee Jack Lew asserts that President Obama will not tax carbon dioxide emissions in order to combat climate change. ...

There are, it seems to me, two basic perspectives on the right regarding the Medicaid expansion under Obamacare. Last week saw one perspective from Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who understands that it is enormously important to keep from expanding Medicaid, announcing a policy that will shift many in Wisconsin onto the federal ...

In his 2013 State of the State speech, Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn proposed increasing the state’s minimum wage from $8.25 to $10 an hour over the next four years . A similar minimum wage proposal failed to pass in the state Senate in 2012. Minimum wage laws are meant to protect workers’ health and well-being by mandating a ...

Scott Gottlieb of the American Enterprise Institute highlights an issue that may have escaped notice to this point: under Obamacare, children enrolled in the Children's Health Insurance Program are going to be shifted around whether they want to be or not. For them, Medicaid is mandatory. Gottlieb explains: CHIP has plenty of ...

Can you quantify the dollar value of school choice? Michael McShane thinks he can. He and Patrick Wolf published a study concluding that every $1 taxpayers spend on the Washington DC vouchers program generates $2.62 in economic benefits for the participants and society. He joins the School Reform News podcast to talk about ...

Research by Harvard professor David Keith suggests that the global capacity for energy generation from wind power has been overestimated, and that geophysical / climate effects of turbines will reduce the benefits of large-scale power installations. "People have often thought there's no upper bound for wind power—that it's one ...

As our modest global warming returns the Earth to temperatures that prevailed prior to the Little Ice Age, global and regional benefits include shrinking deserts, greater soil moisture, and increased crop production. Nevertheless, global warming alarmists continue to tell the lie that global warming is having an opposite effect ...

Representatives Ed Royce (R-CA) and Carolyn McCarthy (D-NY) have introduced the Credit Union Small Business Jobs Creation Act (HR 688), which would lift the member business lending cap on credit unions from 12.25 percent to 27.5 percent of total assets. Small and medium-sized businesses are a key engine of the U.S. economy ...

Young adults are carrying less debt than before the start of the 2008 recession, primarily because they own fewer major assets. A new analysis from the Pew Research Center released February 21 shows Americans under the age of 35 are putting off high-dollar purchases like automobiles and houses. The median debt of households ...

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker announced he will reject federal Medicaid expansion in Wisconsin, instead reforming the state’s program to move hundreds of thousands of uninsured Wisconsinites to private insurance and the federal health care exchange established under President Obama’s health care law. Turning down some $4 billion from ...

Why aren’t American students proficient in mathematics? Teens graduate from high school unprepared for college math and with a strong antipathy to the subject. Most graduates require extensive remediation. There is a dearth of K-12 math skills across the nation. Why is the United States, long a global education leader, suffering ...

The speech in the attached PDF was delivered by Heartland Institute President Joseph Bast on February 23, 2013, at the Eighth Annual Wisconsin Conservative Conference, Bluemound Gardens, Wauwatosa, Wisconsin. An excerpt is below: In 2016, in time for the next presidential election, every child now in high school will be eligible ...

Property owners won a major victory when a federal judge in Massachusetts ruled against the U.S. Justice Department’s attempt to seize a family-owned motel because of 15 drug-related arrests involving lodgers there between 1994 and 2008. The Justice Department never alleged the hotel’s owners or their employees had anything to ...

At the annual meeting of the American Economic Association in San Diego (January 4-6, 2013), Harvard professor of economics Benjamin Friedman said, “The standard models we teach … simply have no room in them for what most of the world’s central banks have done in response to the crisis.” Friedman advises sweeping aside the ...

Global warming alarmists are 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 only 36 percent agree with the United Nations Intergovernmental ...

The Indiana Senate on Thursday passed Senate Bill 193, a measure providing for public hearings around the state to reconsider adoption of Common Core education standards. The vote was 38-11, with all Republicans and three Democrats voting for the bill. It now moves to the Indiana House. House Education Chairman Robert Behning ...