The Heartland Institute

Approaching the Fiscal Cliff As we approach 2013, taxpayers are waiting to see if Congress will let the nation go over the so-called fiscal cliff by allowing the largest tax increase in American history and budget cuts to go into effect. There is still wide disagreement over which tax hikes to prevent and what spending ...

A Texas high school can’t expel Andrea Hernandez for refusing to wear a location-tracking ID badge, a district judge ruled Nov. 21. A week later, an anonymous hacker temporarily disabled the school district’s website, threatening long-term interference if the district does not discuss its tracking program with parents. The hacker ...

An employee at a New York state company involved in a union decertification vote wrote “vulgar, offensive, or threatening statements” on union newsletters in a company break room. The statements were aimed at inducing fellow employees to support the union. During a company investigation begun after female employees complained ...

The board of a conservative legislator network has decided it will remain neutral on Common Core standards rather than endorse model legislation encouraging states to drop the nationwide K-12 requirements for student learning. In December Washington, DC meetings and future months, the American Legislative Exchange Council will ...

The American Farm Bureau Federation and the West Virginia Farm Bureau can intervene on behalf of a chicken farm owner suing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for overstepping its bounds in regulating under the Clean Water Act, a federal district court has ruled. EPA fought the right of the Farm Bureaus to intervene, claiming ...

In a letter to U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, Texas Gov. Rick Perry confirmed his state has no intention of implementing an insurance exchange or expanding Medicaid, despite the reelection of President Obama. Echoing an earlier letter written in July, in his November letter Perry, a Republican, noted ...

Illinois’ pension problem is “unfixable” – not only because of the overwhelming magnitude of the problem, but because lawmakers “won’t fix it,” a Chicago business group has warned in a letter to Gov. Pat Quinn (D). Meanwhile, Quinn’s office now is using a figure of $95 billion for the amount of the state’s unfunded pension ...

New taxes and more Dodd-Frank regulations are possible in 2013, all of which could harm a badly needed housing recovery, says real estate expert Stuart Vener. ...

Government officials promoting the use of bioenergy feedstocks should be very careful not to unleash a new wave of invasive species on U.S. soil, more than 200 scientists warn in a letter sent to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson and four other top Obama administration officials. Energy Benefits, Environment Harms “Studies have shown ...

Plans to build streetcar lines in San Antonio are based on several critical fallacies, including claims that streetcars are superior to buses in their ability to attract riders and that streetcars promote economic development. In fact, streetcars are slower, less flexible, less capable of moving large numbers of people, and far ...

In the wake of the presidential election, state governors must decide whether to take federal funding to expand their Medicaid programs. The U.S. Supreme Court decided in June states can reject the Medicaid expansion without losing access to their previously negotiated matching funds. According to Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, incoming ...

Editor’s Note: This is the fourth and final installment in a series of articles by Mischa Popoff and Jay Lehr on modern agriculture and organic farming. With only rare exceptions, all food production is completely unnatural. The means by which science has allowed us to increase production on a smaller piece of land, and to ...

A new reform majority on the Indianapolis School Board is poised to make significant changes in the low-performing Indiana school district. In several close races, voters elected newcomers Gayle Cosby, a Lawrence Township teacher; Caitlin Hannon, a former IPS teacher; and businessman Sam Odle to the board in November, while reelecting ...

CONTENTS INTRODUCTION .... 1 CURRENT STRESSES .... 6 The Policy Maze: California's Renewable and Distributed Power Programs .... 6 Rising Utility Costs and Rates: Electricity “Sticker Shock” .... 11 Cost Allocation: Uneven Cost Burdens on Utility Customers .... 16 INSTITUTIONAL CONCERNS .... 20 The Regulatory Institutional Framework ...

Critics of the Bush tax cuts often dismiss the tax changes as a failed experiment in free-market economics. Noting that economic growth was slower in the years following the cuts than in the years preceding them, some critics see the experience as evidence that tax cuts do not work. But the claim that these tax cuts exemplified ...

Entitlement reform and the fiscal cliff with Ben Domenech and Francis Cianfrocca. ...

California’s recycling program for aluminum cans and plastic containers suffers rampant fraud, with enterprising criminals claiming multiple refunds for a single recycled container and others bringing in truckloads of containers from out of state to claim illegal refunds. Budget-Busting Losses California officials estimate recycling ...

Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt has amended his state’s lawsuit against President Obama’s health care law to address a legal problem with the Internal Revenue Service’s distribution of insurance exchange subsidies—an issue which could effectively bar implementation of the law in certain states. Pruitt’s new challenge focuses ...

Alternative energy development has taken another hit as the world’s largest developer of wind turbines, Denmark-based Vestas Wind Systems, trimmed its U.S. workforce by approximately 20 percent. Vestas says the reason for the layoffs is lagging revenues and the uncertain future of federal subsidies. Bleeding Jobs, Value The job ...

A West Virginia lawyer who beat up his client with a baseball bat, and even continued to beat the client as he lay on the ground, has been disbarred for ethical violations. Aggravating factors were the lawyer previously took money belonging to another client and threw a propane tank through the window of his wife’s ...