The Heartland Institute

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. ...

A federal judge last fall struck down the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s current iteration of federal position limits on holdings of commodity futures contracts. A month and a half later, the CFTC announced the commission would appeal the court’s decision. At this time, therefore, the federally imposed position limits ...

The scientific method prevailed against shoddy science as The Heartland Institute hosted its Eighth International Conference on Climate Change, Nov. 30 and Dec. 1 in Munich, Germany. The European Institute for Climate and Energy (known by its German acronym, EIKE) co-hosted the conference, which attracted nearly 200 attendees and ...

Congress passed the American Taxpayer Relief Act on January 1, 2013, and it should be the death, for the time being, of the carbon tax. Whatever may happen in the future regarding the tax, Furchtgott-Roth concludes that a "carbon tax would just be another regressive revenue raiser, costing $75 billion a year, hurting the ...

It’s not often that cynical official Washington is outraged by chutzpah, but it happened recently when 18 Democrat senators and senators-elect sent a letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid asking for a delay in the effective date of Obamacare’s medical device tax. One of 20 new or higher taxes in Obamacare, the medical ...

Global warming alarmists and skeptics alike report Heartland Institute Senior Fellow James Taylor scored a decisive victory over Ray Bellamy, an official presenter for Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project, in a global warming debate in Tallahassee, Florida. Rare Public Debate Gore’s Climate Reality Project surprised observers by agreeing ...

After several years of cuts in aid, offloading of state expenses, and unfunded mandates, Maryland county officials who gathered for their annual conference have decided “enough is enough,” said Rick Pollitt, new president of the Maryland Association of Counties. Like many of the hundreds of elected and appointed officials who ...

A soda fountain in St. Paul may be fined $500 by city inspectors for selling candy cigarettes. Lynden’s Soda Fountain opened a few months ago but was recently warned it was violating the city’s ban on candy cigarettes, passed in 2009. It said it won’t keep selling the candy cigarettes or bubblegum cigars, but it is promoting ...

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 ...

Federal Bureau of Reclamation officials opened up turbines and bypass tubes in the Glen Canyon Dam in northern Arizona, unleashing a simulated flood designed to mimic a natural flood in the Colorado River and Grand Canyon ecosystems. The simulated flood, which began Nov. 19, increased the Colorado River’s flow from 8,000 cubic ...

Actor Gérard Depardieu's decision to flee France for Belgium to avoid a 75 percent marginal tax rate on incomes above $1.3 million sends a message we here in America should heed: Those who are singled out for tax increases are not stationary targets. The means of avoiding and evading the taxman are legion. U.S. government ...

Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project squared off against The Heartland Institute in a global warming debate January 8 in Tallahassee, Florida. More than 260 people attended the hour-long debate, which resulted in standing room only at the Tallahassee Elks Club Lodge, which hosted the event. Video footage of the debate is now posted ...

Muskegon County, Michigan wants to build a new jail, and the county's prevailing wage law means local taxpayers could be on the hook for an extra $2 million for the project. Prevailing wage laws mandate union-scale wages be paid on construction work funded by taxpayer dollars, regardless of the winning bidder. Local governments ...

You might think the Affordable Care Act’s primary aim, as the name indicates, would be to make affordable health insurance available to every American. You’d be wrong: Its aim was actually to make health insurance available to every American and empower the federal government to manage the insurance marketplace from on high ...

Collaboration and group work are all the rage in education right now. But research indicates people do their best work individually. One of the latest such studies comes from the Netherlands, and was recently published in the European Journal of Social Psychology. Bernard Nijstad, a professor at the University of Groningen ...

A Louisiana woman has the constitutional right to hang Christmas lights on her house in a pattern giving her neighbors the middle finger. She had been in the midst of an argument with the neighbors when she hung the lights last month. The neighbors called the police, who threatened to arrest her for violating the local ...

Public education has taken many forms over the last 300 years. Early in our history, public education referred to formal instruction in public settings outside the home. As public teaching became increasingly common in the latter half of the 18th century, communities began creating tuition-free schools that operated independently ...

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) has announced he plans to ask legislators to end the state’s personal income tax and corporate tax and replace them with a higher sales tax. Jindal said in a statement released January 10: "We are meeting with every legislator over the coming weeks to discuss the details of the tax reform ...

Robert Murphy writes for the Institute for Energy Research that nobody denies a carbon tax would damage the conventional economy. He further argues that a carbon tax would not really make a significant impact on global warming. ...