The Heartland Institute

The billions of dollars a dozen financial institutions recently agreed to pay to settle government complaints over banking and mortgage lending practices come with a twist: The financial institutions likely will receive billions of dollars of tax deductions. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) sent a letter to federal financial regulators ...

Vocabulary is vital to learning in every subject, studies show. To get a more accurate view of U.S. students’ vocabulary, the National Center for Education Statistics adapted its vocabulary and reading comprehension assessment in 2009. The second round of results shows U.S. students have only a mediocre vocabulary. Vocabulary ...

The State Teacher Policy Yearbook provides detailed analysis of any and every state policy that impacts the teaching profession. The Yearbook is a 52-volume encyclopedia (51 state reports including the District of Columbia plus a national summary) produced every other year, measuring states' policies against a realistic blueprint ...

James McGill Buchanan Jr. died Wednesday, January 9, 2013 in Blacksburg, Virginia. In 1986 he won the Nobel Prize in economics mainly for establishing the public choice school of economics. I was a student at his graduate seminar in public choice at University of California-Los Angeles when he was visiting professor in the ...

The implementation of a new and controversial piece of legislation, which critics say would damage the fragile U.S. economy and negatively impact the seven million American expats around the world, is “losing momentum,” according to the boss of the world’s largest independent financial advisory firm. The comments from Nigel Green ...

A group of prison inmates in Idaho is suing major beer companies, alleging the brewers are responsible for their lives of crime. One of the prisoners killed a man five years ago. Two others were convicted of grand theft and drug violations. All of the plaintiffs claim they didn’t know alcohol is addictive and habit-forming ...

In 2007, University of Pennsylvania Professor J. Scott Armstrong’s attention was drawn to former VP Gore’s concerns about global warming. Having spent five decades studying the science of forecasting, Armstrong decided to examine the basis for the forecasts of global warming. He was unable to find a single scientific forecast ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...