The Heartland Institute

One of the great privileges I have in working for Heartland is the opportunity to help elected officials at all levels of government discover, develop, and promote free-market solutions to economic and social problems. Heartland realizes busy elected officials have little or no staff and need a reliable source of research ...

Nearly a year has passed since the Florida legislature passed H.B. 7117, handing over $100 million in subsidies to the renewable energy industry, and Gov. Rick Scott is seeking proof the taxpayer dollars are actually benefiting Florida’s economy. Putnam Claims Economic Benefits In April 2013, Scott, a Republican, appeared poised ...

Since the housing crisis began five years ago, much of the focus has been on the hundreds of thousands of delinquent borrowers and the banks that have foreclosed on them. However, some banks are now seeing themselves threatened with foreclosures. The threats are coming from hundreds of homeowners and condo associations that ...

Hundreds of parents, grandparents, and children packed a January Indiana Senate hearing on a bill to remove the state from the Common Core, a national list detailing what K-12 students should know in every grade. State senators’ sentiments seemed mixed, but the audience leaned toward supporting Senate Bill 193. Approximately ...

Something has orchestrated the ebbing and flowing of global TC activity over the last 5,000 years, but that something has most certainly not been changes in the atmosphere’s CO2 concentration... Read More Free-Air CO2-Enrichment May Not Be All It’s Cracked Up to Be (15 Jan 2013) A new study suggests that the long-used ...

United Nations officials have repeatedly predicted more warming than has occurred in the real world, according to a leaked copy of a draft United Nations climate report. Warming Predictions in Doubt The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is preparing to issue its Fifth Assessment Report in 2013. An IPCC ...

North Carolina . . . Nebraska . . . Louisiana . . . governors and top lawmakers in these and other states have recently announced their desire to roll back and even end personal and corporate income taxes. Brian Balfour of the Civitas Institute in North Carolina explains why this is happening now, and how such moves ...

A partisan battle is shaping up in Missouri over the Medicaid expansion mandated by President Obama’s health care law. Under the U.S. Supreme Court’s June ruling, states may decide whether they will accept federal funds to allow families and individuals making up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level to receive Medicaid ...

January’s fiscal cliff deal delayed major cuts to federal education spending—at least until March, when mandatory cuts are slated to decrease it by 8.2 percent, or $4 billion. “While $4 billion is a fairly large number, there are a lot programs from which it can be taken,” said Michael Shires, an associate professor at Pepperdine ...

Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton has proposed a new top marginal tax rate for high-income-earners several times. The proposals are designed to target a group Dayton says is not paying its fair share of taxes. Several states, including Hawaii, Maryland, and New York, have implemented taxes on high-income-earners in recent years. In ...

Citizens and businesses are fleeing states with fiscal problems – that is one apparent message from the latest annual report from United Van Lines. The company’s study of 2012 interstate shipments, released in December, showed significant continuing flight from states with high state government debt loads as measured by the Institute ...

Connecticut officials emphasize the job impact of incentives given to companies, often referencing calculations done using economic modeling software to justify the deals, but they don’t apply the same scrutiny to tax changes such as the largest-in-state-history increase passed two years ago. Although state officials could use the ...

It’s a tale of two numbers: $2.9 billion and $9.6 billion. The first number, $2.9 billion, represents the reduction in education funding in the state budget for fiscal 2012-2013. The second number, $9.6 billion, represents the projected value of the annual oil and gas production in the State of Ohio by 2014 as a result of ...

Today at 1:30 p.m. ET, Indiana's Senate Education Committee will hear testimony on a bill to withdraw the state from the Common Core. The Common Core is a set of grade-by-grade requirements for what kids should know in math and English. Forty-five states have adopted it, and Indiana led in promoting and participating in it ...

On December 5 the PBS NewsHour showed a segment titled “Endangered Coral Reefs Die as Ocean Temperatures Rise and Water Turns Acidic,” with Hari Sreenivasan reporting. The story discussed the recent loss of Florida coral reefs and the possible impact on recreation and tourism if reef degradation continues. But PBS wrongly told ...

The earth below the United States contains 5 percent of the world’s known recoverable uranium deposits. More than a quarter of U.S. uranium is found in southern Virginia at Coles Hill near Chatham in Pittsylvania County. The two uranium deposits at Coles Hill are valued at $7 billion and together constitute the seventh largest ...

Benjamin Domenech discusses how Obamacare is increasing your insurance premiums. ...

In January, Congress voted to send an extra $100 million to Head Start, a few weeks after Department of Health and Human Services released its long-overdue evaluation of the federal preschool program, finding it has no benefit to children past first grade. Researchers finished collecting study data in 2008, but didn’t release ...

Want a job that fully covers health insurance premiums? How about one that pays more money if you work a later shift? And provides stipends for clothes and shoes? And what about work that gives pay raises of as much as 15 percent even as other companies slash jobs and salaries? Welcome to Iowa! The state has long offered ...

Ralph Benko of thegoldstandardnow.org and americanprinciplesproject.org scoffs at the notion of the federal government minting trillion dollar coins to avoid the debt ceiling, and explains how sound money can bring greater peace and prosperity. ...