The Heartland Institute

As if Chicago police didn’t have enough to do. As of the end of September 2012, 400 people were murdered in the city, largely due to gang shootings. The death toll is expected to reach 500 by the end of the year. Yet one Chicago alderman wants a new law requiring jail time for persons caught feeding pigeons. It’s already ...

The economic, environmental, and political realities surrounding a carbon tax are clear indications that this is bad policy. Recently, two bipartisan resolutions publicly denounced the possibility of a carbon tax, highlighting the crushing economic and minimal environmental effects of the tax. One resolution, sponsored concurrently ...

Kansas Renewable Energy Mandate January 9, 2013 Problem In May 2009, House Bill 2369 established a renewable portfolio standard (RPS) for the state of Kansas, requiring the state's utilities to generate or purchase a percentage of their electricity from a list of eligible resources including wind, solar, small-scale hydropower, and ...

Cigarette taxes have been in the news lately, and not just because politicians keep raising them. What’s new is that state and local levies have grown so onerous in some parts of the country that they almost could be called “prohibition by price.” And like other forms of prohibition, this one has led to a spike in smuggling ...

With the Illinois legislature back in session, representatives of the oil and gas industry and environmental activists are directing their attention to Senate Bill 3280, an amendment to the Oil and Gas Act currently pending in the House Rules Committee. The legislation would impose regulations on the process of hydraulic fracturing ...

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency rejected a bipartisan request from 10 governors, dozens of U.S. congressmen, and a coalition of livestock and poultry groups to temporarily waive a requirement that transportation fuel be blended with ethanol. Under the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), which was signed into law by President ...

English teachers nationwide are puzzling over a math problem: How to include the right percentages of “informational text” new standards demand in their classes. In 2010, 45 states adopted the same lists detailing what kids should know in English and math at each K-12 grade. Although advocates promised uniformity would bring ...

Traditional economic models of how to manage environmental problems relating to renewable natural resources, such as fisheries, have tended to recommend either government regulation or privatisation and the explicit definition of property rights. These traditional models ignore the practical reality of natural resource management. Many ...

This exhaustive study by the United States Geological Survey and Dept of the Interior, uncovered no groundwater contamination from natural-gas drilling in the energy-rich Fayetteville Shale in Arkansas. The findings from this study were based on the sampling of 127 domestic wells in the western part of the shale-gas production ...

It's no coincidence that states with the highest taxes on cigarettes have the highest rates of cigarette smuggling . . . and other crimes related to the trade in cigarettes to avoid high taxes, says Michael LaFaive of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. ...