The Heartland Institute

Benjamin Domenech explains how the administration's essential benefit requirement that insurers cover the cost of contraception, abortifacients, and sterilization services for minors tramples on parental rights. ...

A new report pinpoints education savings accounts as the next-generation school voucher system for states committed to real education reform. ESAs deposit state per-pupil education spending into an account that parents control, letting them choose how to spend their child’s education dollars among different options such as online ...

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) told reporters yesterday that he would like to see the U.S. Senate address climate change. At the same time, Democrat Reps. Henry Waxman (CA) and Bobby Rush (IL) wrote a letter to Chair of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce Fred Upton (R-MI) calling for hearings on an asserted ...

Absent action from Congress and the president, the United States will face what many are calling a “fiscal cliff” at the beginning of 2013. That describes the increase of several key tax rates as the early-2000s tax cuts expire, the reduction of certain jobs provisions, activation of $1.2 trillion in across-the-board budget ...

New results “challenge current understanding of the effects of temperature on malaria transmission dynamics,” revealing that “increases in temperature need not simply lead to increases in transmission”... Read More Testing Version 4 of the Community Climate System Model (6 November 2012) Meet the new model. Same as the old ...

Despite the lack of action, most policymakers understand the urgency of the federal entitlement crisis, and specifically, of the need to reform the largest entitlements—Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid—to constrain cost growth. Less frequently discussed, however, is the importance of reforming these programs in a way that ...

California voters have approved measures to raise taxes by billions of dollars and rejected a measure to stop labor unions from forcing members to pay dues for union-backed political activities. Proposition 30, successfully championed by Gov. Jerry Brown (D), will raise California’s sales tax a quarter-cent on the dollar for ...

British officials are putting an end to new onshore wind farm construction, halting an energy experiment that has produced little usable electricity while draining the finances of British taxpayers and electricity consumers. Energy Minister John Hayes stunned renewable power lobbyists by announcing the government will approve no ...

President Obama’s reelection with no change of leadership in the House and Senate means he and Education Secretary Arne Duncan will maintain current policies: multiple federal grants for favored initiatives and increased control over state and local education. “[Obama] has shifted the federal role in many ways,” said Jon Schnur ...

Voters around the nation went all over the map in responding to education initiatives on November’s ballot. Washington and Georgia voted to allow independent charter schools, Floridians rejected a measure that would have allowed direct vouchers, and some voters—notably in California—approved education tax hikes while others rejected ...

The United States government gives back almost as much money through tax deductions, exemptions and credits as it collects in income taxes. Ending these "tax expenditures" and cutting tax rates to keep down the amount of taxes collected would benefit businesses, individuals, and the economy as a whole, says economist Jeremy ...

An Italian judge has found seven Italian seismologists and geologists guilty of multiple manslaughter for failing to predict a 6.3 magnitude earthquake in 2009 in L’Aquila, Italy. They recently were sentenced to six years in prison. The seven were internationally prominent members of the National Commission for the Forecast ...

Michigan voters in the November 6 election rejected a statewide ballot initiative for a constitutional amendment to make it more difficult to raise state taxes . Proposal 5 called for a two-thirds supermajority vote of both the Michigan House and Senate, or a simple majority vote of the people in a November election, to impose ...

Like their counterparts in other states across the country, Idaho policymakers are considering whether to expand Medicaid in line with the demands of President Obama’s health care law. Two recent reports sound caution about such a step, giving ample reason for the state to delay the expansion or reject it entirely. Leavitt ...

Pros Discourages self-centered, weak writing; encourages grounding arguments in evidence. Encourages classic works over young adult popular fiction. Reading research shows children need broad background information; Core emphasizes “informational text.” Significant emphasis on source documents. Requires more than previous state standards ...

The recovery from the recent recession has been very sluggish, and the nation's governors have struggled with the resulting budget deficits, unemployment, and other economic problems in their states. Many reform-minded governors elected in 2010 have championed tax reforms and spending restraint to get their states back on track ...

What would happen if we deposited all a child’s K-12 education dollars into an account parents control? A new report from Arizona’s Goldwater Institute discusses just such a system as it unfurls in their state. Report author and Goldwater’s Education Director Jonathan Butcher joins School Reform News Managing Editor Joy Pullmann ...

The so-called Taxpayer Protection Act is anything but, according to an array of free-market, taxpayer, environmental, and insurance organizations that warn the measure would put taxpayers on the hook for billions of dollars of property insurance losses and encourage more development in risky areas. At least two coalitions with ...

Although Kentucky is one of just nine states that do not offer charter schools, a new 2012 law does allow school districts the freedom to operate similarly to the autonomous public schools. "We want schools of innovation not to look like anything we've ever seen before, at least in public schools in Kentucky," said David ...

A comprehensive survey of the nation’s physicians by a respected nonpartisan group has found broad-based pessimism about the future of medicine, President Obama’s health care law, and government-funded health care in general. The biennial survey of 13,575 doctors across the country by the Physicians Foundation found more than half ...