The Heartland Institute

Author and consultant Larry Downes discusses his latest paper, "A Rational Response to the Privacy ‘Crisis.’" ...

Germany's central bank plans to bring back to Germany almost 700 tons of gold reserves it keeps in New York and Paris. By 2020, half of its gold bars will be in its vaults, the Deutsche Bundesbank said in its January 16 announcement. It currently keeps less than a third at home. The bars were originally taken out of ...

Global warming will benefit most Arctic species, a team of scientists report in the peer-reviewed journal PLOS One . The scientists found global warming will allow most Arctic species to expand their ranges and no species are expected to go extinct. The study delivers a sharp blow to global warming activists who have been ...

It didn’t take long for trial lawyers to begin trying to profit from the Newtown massacre. A New Haven lawyer filed a $100 million claim against the state of Connecticut (which would be taken from taxpayers, of course), alleging the state failed to protect students at the Sandy Hook Elementary School. Residents were outraged ...

Friday's ed news: 1. Parents have pulled another Parent Trigger , this time in Los Angeles. 2. Indianapolis' reactionary school superintendent retires . 3. Minnesota may be poised to adopt revisionist history standards . 4. Pennsylvania schools losing students to charters are spending money not on improving but on ads to get the ...

Global warming alarmists and skeptics alike report Heartland Institute Senior Fellow James M. 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. “A number of attendees had their viewpoint about climate change not being ...

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 ...