The Heartland Institute

Carbon taxes have regained traction with several prominent Republican lawmakers and political leaders publicly voicing support for a “revenue-neutral” carbon tax in exchange for tax cuts on capital or investments. Most notably, a new political interest campaign led by former Congressman Bob Inglis (R-SC), the Energy & Enterprise ...

San Francisco Board of Supervisors President David Chiu has introduced legislation that would require building owners who are required to have water drinking fountains to provide bottled water refill stations as well. Reducing Use of Plastic The legislation offered June 26 is designed to enable people to keep using, or recycling ...

Meteorologist Anthony Watts explains the importance of his new research on heat biases in the U.S. temperature record. ...

Michigan lawmakers are considering addressing the state’s debilitating $22 billion teacher pension deficit by switching incoming state teachers to a 401(k)-style plan instead of the traditional defined-benefit plan. Gov. Rick Snyder and other lawmakers have stated concerns such a transition would cost taxpayers too much, but because ...

Few taxes imposed by state and local governments are more controversial than the estate tax, popularly referred to as the “death tax.” Estate taxes are levies on property transferred from a deceased person’s estate to relatives or other parties. The estate tax rate is scheduled to automatically increase, and the amount excluded ...

According to a report by the Texas Transportation Institute, the cost of urban traffic congestion, converted to a dollar value, quintupled between 1982 and 2007. Although congestion costs have fallen recently due to the recession and decreased economic activity, the cost of urban congestion remains more than $100 billion a year ...

Recent research demonstrates a growing divide among America’s wealthier and poorer households. The groups used to diverge mainly on income, with poorer people routinely moving up the ladder throughout their lives and their children’s lives, but in recent decades the two have begun to differ also by habits of personal behavior ...

With the nation’s economy still in the doldrums, unemployment compensation funds in many states have become insolvent. One reason is that waste and fraud plague the system. In some states nearly 20 percent of all benefit payments result from error or fraud, according to the National Center for Policy Analysis. A July 2012 ...

Review of Silent Spring at 50: Reflections on an Environmental Classic , by Roger E. Meiners and Andrew P. Morriss (PERC, 2012), 32 pages I have been writing about Rachel Carson’s infamous book Silent Spring for much of the 50 years since its publication. With ten years of environmental education behind me when the book was ...

In Massachusetts, Governor Deval Patrick shows us what the future looks like for life under Obamacare: a total government takeover of the marketplace. Massachusetts spends more per capita on health care than any other state and therefore more than anywhere else in the industrialized world. Costs are 27% higher than the U.S ...

A judge recently ruled that a Parent Trigger petition from parents in Adelanto, California is valid and their request to convert their children’s school to a charter must go into effect. California is the first state to pass a Parent Trigger law, which a dozen other states also have considered. It allows a simple majority ...

Less than half of Americans believe global warming is occurring and is primarily caused by humans, a newly published Angus Reid public opinion poll reports. Merely 42 percent of Americans and 43 percent of Britons believe global warming is occurring and is primarily caused by humans, according to the three-nation poll. Canadians ...

Outstanding student loan debt in the United States topped $1 trillion in 2011—$864 billion of federal student debt and approximately $150 billion of private student loan debt, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the U.S. Department of Education. “Our findings reveal that students were yet another group of ...

After months of study, punctuated by a highly emotional public debate, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo will soon announce his decision on whether to allow natural gas production through hydraulic fracturing, also known as fracking, in the Empire State. Deferring to Local Government Sources within the Cuomo administration indicate the ...

Benjamin Domenech talks with block grant expert John Mashburn about Medicaid, food stamps, and welfare reform. ...

Yet another alternative energy company financed by taxpayer subsidies has gone out of business, leaving taxpayers on the hook for millions of dollars. Abound Solar, which specialized in high-tech solar panels, benefited from a $400 million dollar federal loan guarantee but announced on June 28 it would be filing for bankruptcy ...

Charter school K-12 enrollment has nearly doubled over the last decade in Minnesota, the first state to allow charter schools, according to a new analysis of state Education Department data by the Center for School Change. The report shows nearly 19,000 more students enrolled in charter K-12 schools in 2011-2012 compared with ...

As president of the Public Service Research Foundation, David Denholm has spent many years studying the impact of unions on government policies. He says the recent bankruptcy of Stockton, California, could be just a taste of things to come, as retirement obligations strangle municipal finances and put municipal bonds at ...

If Illinois school districts and teachers paid a share of their own pension contributions, scarce taxpayer dollars could go to the schools that need them most, according to a new report from the Illinois Policy Institute. The state currently pays the “employer share” of a teacher’s pension contribution, which school districts ...

A reanalysis of U.S. surface temperature station data shows temperatures are rising only half as much as claimed by the U.S. Historical Climatology Network and other government gatekeepers of temperature data. The reanalysis is the first using the Siting Classification System devised by the MATEO-France French national meteorological ...