The Heartland Institute

Between 30 and 40 percent of students in every grade level say school is “too easy,” according to a report from the Center for American Progress. The report examined student surveys collected by the National Association for Educational Progress, a widely trusted nationwide test conducted every year. “There’s a popular perception ...

A group of free-market think tanks Monday filed a brief in federal court challenging the constitutionality of the Federal Communication Commission's 2011 "Preserving the Open Internet" Order. The group's amici curiae brief says the FCC's rule denies Internet service providers their constitutional rights and forces consumers to "bear ...

Wisconsin State Rep. Robin Vos recently called for a legislative council committee on state income tax reform to look at the state’s current, progressive, income tax structure. Vos is calling for a tax code that is efficient, fair, and simple, and he says tax reform should not inhibit economic growth. The reforms most likely ...

New Hampshire’s House and Senate voted to overturn a veto from Democratic Gov. John Lynch of Senate Bill 406, a medical malpractice reform law. The bill—one of six of the Democrat governor’s vetoes overridden by the Republican-controlled legislature on June 27—will supplement the existing tort process in New Hampshire with an ...

First Stockton, then San Bernardino. Moody’s Investors Service worries more could be on the way. Stockton, California, filed for bankruptcy in late June, followed less than two weeks later by another major California city, San Bernardino. These recent municipal bankruptcy filings signal more cities may be losing their willingness ...

From the Tech Liberation Front : Proponents of higher taxes have taken to calling the exemption that out-of-state online shoppers enjoy a “loophole,” as if it were an unintended flaw in two established court rulings that addressed the power of one state to tax residents of another. My latest commentary at Reason.org looks at ...

Paul Driessen, senior policy adviser for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), explains how environmental activists are harming the environment and taking human lives. ...

Last week the Washington Post had an extensive write-up about how an anemia drug cost taxpayers billions of dollars without making much of a difference for those receiving it. The piece is available here. It shows that far from being arbiters more sensitive to costs, bureaucracies are warped by industry and lobbyists all the ...

Two lawsuits have been filed against Kim Kardashian and her family in West Virginia, with weird allegations. As if their reality weren’t already weird enough. One lawsuit alleges Kardashian and her ex-husband Kris Humphries and his new girlfriend Myla Sinanaj held the plaintiff at gunpoint in a hotel room along with a ...

This Heritage Foundation "Backgrounder" asserts that for decades, coal has literally been the rock that has powered America with cheap, reliable energy. Yet the federal government is attempting to reduce coal’s role in energy production by imposing an environment in which production decline is inevitable. Congress should reform ...

In states and municipalities across the country, the high cost of traditional defined-benefit public pensions has become a hot-button issue as unfunded liabilities have raced out of control. These increasing liabilities are further complicated by the fact that in many instances the regulators controlling pension funds have overestimated ...

On his office wall, Phil Kilgore has pasted “100 different stickies” to a United States map. Each marks where a group of people want to open a “classical” charter school. In directing Hillsdale College’s charter school initiative, Kilgore said he has discovered a rising wave of ordinary citizens who hope to serve their country ...

Nearly half of the claimed warming during the past century did not occur in the real world but is merely the creation of flawed data adjustments, reports a new paper presented at a meeting of the European Geosciences Union. Removing flawed adjustments to raw temperature readings shows the Earth warmed merely 0.42 degrees during ...

San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro has proposed increasing the city’s sales tax to 8.25 percent to expand government-sponsored pre-kindergarten. The proposal is estimated to spend $140 million over its first five years to offer taxpayer-paid, full-day programs to 4,000 children each year who, according to state and federal guidelines ...

A House panel approved a bill that would axe President Obama's signature education programs , Race to the Top and other grants. It would also reinstate the rule that allows alternately certified teachers to count as "highly qualified." Charter schools raise education standards for vulnerable children. Accidentally disclosed letters ...

In this week’s health care podcast, Manager of External Relations Kendall Antekeier sat down with John C. Goodman, President of the National Center for Policy Analysis. Together they discuss what reforms states can consider after the Supreme Court ruling, many of those suggested by Goodman’s new book “Priceless – Curing the ...

And they appear to be prepared to do it rapidly, as the authors of this report discovered that offspring phenotypes fully adapted to the increase in temperature within a mere two generations, which finding, in the words of the authors, “could indicate that some tropical marine species are more capable of coping with global ...

A New Jersey woman held hostage at knifepoint in a shopping mall until a township police officer shot and killed her captor plans to sue the local township for $5 million, alleging she was psychologically injured as a result of the police officer’s actions. The captor was being pursued by police after a shoplifting incident ...

To the dismay of United Kingdom teachers’ unions, this school year 600,000 British students will be tested on basic grammar and writing. Ten- and 11-year-olds must be able to spell, use apostrophes properly, and identify nouns, verbs, and adjectives to pass the test, part of an education overhaul. UK officials have begun making ...

Myth 1: A tax on Internet sales just enables states to collect taxes they are already legally entitled to collect. Fact: A state is not legally entitled to collect taxes from Internet sellers with no physical presence in that state. In Quill Corp. v. North Dakota, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1992 that a mail-order or ...