The Heartland Institute

What is the future of ObamaCare in Florida now that President Obama is reelected? If Republican Gov. Rick Scott has his way, the state will continue to resist the president’s signature law. Gov. Scott has been a high-profile opponent of Obama’s law since the controversial legislation was proposed. Even though voters returned ...

After half a day of math training, Oregon high school history teacher Jessica Keskitalo is teaching seventh grade math this school year. She is one of 365 Beaverton School District has shifted according to seniority rather than classroom needs during budget cuts. Oregon requires districts to lay off teachers with the least ...

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s Act 10 is working. Since its implementation in July 2011 to reduce state spending, the state budget has been balanced, property taxes have been reduced, and state revenue collections are surging, all for the first time in a decade or more. Dozens of school districts were able to balance their ...

This article from the Hot Air blog notes that California's auction of cap-and-trade credits was a miserable failure. It failed their projections of revenue by some 86%. In this auction, businesses such as oil refineries and utilities bid for credits that allow them to emit greenhouse gases. California officials have imposed ...

The misplaced stress on informational texts (no matter how much is literary nonfiction) reflects the limited expertise of Common Core’s architects and sponsoring organizations in curriculum and in teachers’ training. This division of reading standards was clearly not developed or approved by English teachers and humanities scholars ...

Mississippi’s Phil Bryant is the latest Republican governor to pursue comprehensive education reforms. He recently released an agenda for expanding charter schools, introducing private school choice, holding students back if they can’t read in third grade, and improving teacher quality. “Mississippi children are struggling,” Bryant ...

State workers hoping to receive annual pay raises in the coming years will have to wait for the State of Illinois to creep back from the edge of an unprecedented fiscal cliff. That’s the message desperate lawmakers and other officials are sending to Gov. Pat Quinn (D) and 44 public-sector unions as they embark on contract ...

One suggestion for dealing with greenhouse gas emissions is to implement a revenue-neutral tax on carbon emissions. If we implemented a carbon tax and cut income taxes by the same amount, we would be reducing taxes on something we want (income) and increasing taxes on something we don’t (air pollution). As good as it sounds ...

Heartland’s James M. Taylor and Jim Lakely talk about the Eighth International Conference on Climate Change, held in Munich Germany on Nov. 30 and Dec. 1, 2012. The conference, co-sponsored by the Germany-based European Institute for Climate and Energy (EIKE), was also dubbed the Fifth International Conference on Climate ...

Alberta has the highest level of economic freedom among all Canadian provinces and U.S. states, according to a new report by the Fraser Institute, Canada’s leading public policy think tank. The “Economic Freedom of North America 2012” report ranks Saskatchewan second among the provinces and third overall. Canadian provinces make ...

Hard-up for cash to meet growing employee costs and swelling debt payments, the city of Scranton, Pennsylvania, is hungrily eyeing the paychecks of workers who don’t live in the city. If a three-judge panel in Lackawanna County Court gives its consent, Scranton will move ahead with a plan to tax the income of individuals who ...

Despite its past need, the Transaction Account Guarantee is potentially very dangerous. Transaction accounts can move very quickly. Once interest rates start to rise (as they inevitably will), corporations could move their money into interest-bearing accounts or other investments, leaving banks that depend on these deposits to finance ...

One of the major complications in the current fiscal cliff debate is that both sides are overreaching, trying to tie a near-term resolution to a sweeping deficit reduction plan that would address the longer-term budgetary crisis looming in the years ahead. They see the cliff negotiations as a stage for a “grand bargain” on ...

A Michigan state trial court judge previously censured by the Michigan Supreme Court for sending a “nearly naked” photograph of himself to a sheriff’s department employee is under investigation again. This time, he’s accused of impregnating a complaining witness in a case pending before him. He allegedly promised to divorce his ...

In 2009, Gina Raimondo was working in the private sector in Rhode Island and raising a family. She had been concerned about state government finances for some time. Then one day, incited by a news article, she decided to do something about it. She ran for Treasurer of Rhode Island and won the 2010 election despite focusing ...

Republicans appear to be warming to the notion of raising revenues to avoid the fiscal cliff, which is precisely the wrong thing to do. Instead they should be insisting on spending cuts. Real ones. Starting now. So says Richard Manning of Americans for Limited Government. ...

One of Utah’s most ambitious municipal broadband programs is facing serious subscribership and funding problems. The Utah Telecommunications Open Infrastructure Agency (UTOPIA), a municipal broadband program organized in 2002 by a group of communities in the Wasatch Front area of the state, is facing massive debt, low enrollment ...

The Committee does not believe that Glass-Steagall should be reinstated, and sees no persuasive rationale for the Volcker Rule. The 1999 partial "repeal" of Glass-Steagall in the Gramm- Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) eliminated some restrictions on the ability of bank holding companies (BHCs) —but not insured banks—to engage in underwriting ...

The conceptual approaches to prudential regulation embodied in the Basel III and the U.S. approaches suffer from fundamental deficiencies that require remediation. These deficiencies include (1) relying upon fixed risk weights for measuring risk-based capital that are arguably inaccurate, 2) relying upon fixed weights that, even ...

An excellent article from James Huffman at the Hoover Institution on the difference between health care and health insurance is well worth your time. What is insurance, and how does it work? People face two kinds of future costs in their lives – those they can count on and budget for (or choose not to incur) and ...