The Heartland Institute

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 ...

On December 5 the PBS NewsHour showed a segment titled “Endangered Coral Reefs Die as Ocean Temperatures Rise and Water Turns Acidic,” with Hari Sreenivasan reporting. The story discussed the recent loss of Florida coral reefs and the possible impact on recreation and tourism if reef degradation continues. But PBS wrongly told ...

The earth below the United States contains 5 percent of the world’s known recoverable uranium deposits. More than a quarter of U.S. uranium is found in southern Virginia at Coles Hill near Chatham in Pittsylvania County. The two uranium deposits at Coles Hill are valued at $7 billion and together constitute the seventh largest ...

Benjamin Domenech discusses how Obamacare is increasing your insurance premiums. ...

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 ...

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 ...