The Heartland Institute

A new tax levied by President Obama’s health care law will likely hike veterinary bills for the nation’s pet owners as businesses pass their increased costs along to consumers. The news comes as even Senate Democrats who voted for the law are demanding the tax in question be postponed. The Internal Revenue Service will administer ...

A Buffalo Bills fan is suing the football team, alleging it sent him too many text messages. The man signed up on the team’s Web site to receive text message updates on scores and other team news. He alleges the site stated he would receive three to five messages per week, but says he received six messages one week and ...

Jim Lakely talks with Taylor Smith, policy analyst at The Heartland Institute, about a Policy Brief he wrote with James M. Taylor titled "PricewaterhouseCoopers' 'Too Late' Report: Poor Science, No Practical Solutions." The brief is a rebuttal to a PWC report from November that predicts at least 2 degrees Celsius warming ...

Michel Nasibu, an advisor in the International Development Advisory Section of KPMG East Africa, attempted this week to salvage his claims that global warming is devastating the African continent after I debunked his initial claims in an October Forbes.com article . As was the case with Nasibu’s October column, I empathize with ...

This article in the Wall Street Journal accounts for the failed BTU tax offered by the Clinton administration, and assesses the chances of a revived carbon tax in President Obama's 2nd term. Scientists are calling into question the impact human beings have on global warming, therefore, the concept of a tax on something that ...

Friday's ed news: More than two dozen Missouri lawmakers want to give teachers the freedom to bear guns . Indiana already allows designated teachers to bring guns to school. Parents are rushing to buy bullet-proof backpacks for their children. The U.S. Department of Education took four years to release data indicating federal preschool ...

New teachers need not take education philosophy and methods classes or major in education to enter an Indiana classroom, after a 9-2 State Board of Education vote easing teacher license requirements. Although incoming state superintendent and union president Glenda Ritz objected to the changes, board members adopted what they ...

Pennsylvania’s renewable energy mandate will likely cost the state $2 billion per year during the next eight years, the Beacon Hill Institute at Suffolk University reports in a newly published economic analysis. Despite the high cost, the renewable energy mandate will provide few if any environmental benefits, the study concluded ...

Nothing can be made, transported, or used without energy, and fossil fuels provide 80 percent of mankind’s energy and 60 percent of its food and clothing. Thus, absent fossil fuels, global cropland would have to increase by 150 percent to meet current food demand, but conversion of habitat to cropland is already the greatest ...

Tom Tanton, the Director, Science & Technology Assessment at the American Tradition Institute, blogs about a new study produced by this think tank. The study f inds that the full cost of wind electricity is nearly twice what has been reported. Furthermore, hidden costs and subsidies are not taken into account. The blog summarizes ...

Pennsylvania’s current Alternative Energy Portfolio Standard law will raise the cost of electricity by $2.55 billion for the state’selectricity consumers in 2021, within a range of $1.71 billion and $3.24 billion. Pennsylvania’s electricity prices will rise by 11.9 percent by 2021, due to the current AEPS law. ...

In this Policy Analysis, Goklany notes the development of nature in providing for humanity. We receive food, fuel, clothing, medicine, transportation, mechanical power from some element of nature. Technologies and cheap fossil fuels have contributed mightily to the betterment of humanity on this Earth. The author concludes that ...

With respect to the implications of their several findings, Jaafar et al. say they point to “the possible improvement of [the] health-promoting quality of Malaysian L. pumila under high CO2 enrichment conditions, as atmospheric CO2 enrichment increased the quantity of several phenolic and flavonoid compounds between 100 and 1100 ...

In the Fiscal Cliff negotiations, we have heard ad nauseum from the Left about making “The Rich” – the 1% ( oops, they now mean 2% ) – “pay their fair share” of federal income taxes. When it comes to the nation’s Internet bandwidth-using 1%, however, many on the Left are demanding the 99% pay for the vast majority of the ...

Michigan has become the 24th state to enact "right-to-work," a law that says people may not be forced to join or pay dues to a labor union. Vince Vernuccio of the Michigan-based Mackinac Center for Public Policy tells us why the home state of the powerful United Auto Workers union has embraced labor freedom instead ...

We are entering the age of personalized medicine, where the therapy that’s best for you will be based on your physiology and genetic makeup—and may not be right for any other patient. Wondrous developments are taking place in medical science, including implantable or attachable devices that can monitor patients with numerous ...

The quality of regulation depends heavily on its transparency. Taking to heart Justice Louis Brandeis’ stated belief that sunshine is the best disinfectant, the purpose of this report card is to put important information from scattered sources into one easily accessible place. This report card focuses on the U.S. Environmental ...

Ever since then-candidate Obama's brief exchange with "Joe the Plumber" there has been plenty of mention of wealth redistribution in the major media. Then came the recovery of a 2001 interview in which the former Senator faulted the framers of the US Constitution and the Founders who authored the Declaration of Independence ...

A for-profit publishing corporation won an injunction against the Obama administration’s implementation of the president’s health reform law, which could prove the basis for the next challenge to the law to arrive before the U.S. Supreme Court. Judge Reggie Walton, of the U.S. District Court in Washington, DC, granted the injunction ...

Throughout the debate over ObamaCare—and back to HillaryCare and beyond—the fundamental question in health reform has always been this: Who will control our choices—government or individuals? Each side has won battles over the last 15 years in the tug of war between those who want a system that empowers the individual and ...