The Heartland Institute

Early this week U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid began the process of pushing to the Senate floor an online tax bill originally titled the Marketplace Fairness Act, bypassing the committee process. The proposal would expand states’ ability to force out-of-state retailers to collect sales taxes for online and mail-order ...

This week sponsors of the Marketplace Fairness Act, Sens. Mike Enzi and Dick Durbin, are introducing an amendment intended as a proxy vote for the expansion of states’ ability to charge sales taxes on out-of-state retailers regardless of whether the retailer had a physical presence in the state. Last week a group of 16 conservative ...

Yes, Leftists are talking about taxing emails. Again. Ponder for but a moment the monumental government overreach necessary to monitor and count every email every American sends. Network Neutrality and President Barack Obama’s Cyber Security Executive Order are hay-yuge government Web data grabs. They pale in comparison to this ...

Comcast has instituted a program, now in its second year, called Internet Essentials . Its purpose is to give low-income families — those eligible for school lunch programs — affordable access to broadband technology in the home. The program provides Internet service for $9.95 a month (plus government taxes, natch) and a $150 ...

U.S. Sens. Mike Enzi (R-WY), Dick Durbin (D-IL), and Lamar Alexander (R-TN) have introduced the Marketplace Fairness Act, a bill that would allow states to collect sales taxes on Web-based businesses that are headquartered outside their state borders. The bill is drawing support from many “traditional” retailers with “bricks-and ...

College students may now be able to receive credit for free online courses known as MOOCs– “Massive Open Online Courses .” In what could be a significant step toward greater student access and lower costs for higher education, in February the American Council on Education (ACE) announced it will recommend five MOOCs for credit ...

Over the past few years many states have passed so-called Amazon taxes that have produced very little revenue and in some cases have been overturned in court. At the same time Congress has tried to expand states' ability to tax purchases made online and from mail-order catalogs by neutering the physical presence standard. Only ...

Obsolete thinking and rear-view-mirror analysis comprise Professor Susan Crawford’s new book Captive Audience — the Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age . Unfortunately, the only “gilded” thing in this book is the analysis with fool’s gold. Obviously nostalgic for the simpler government-controlled times of long ...

Next week experts from Heartland will spend Valentine’s Day in Topeka, Kansas testifying on a bill that would amend the state’s renewable portfolio standard (RPS). The bill would postpone the deadlines by which utilities are required to increase the percentages of electricity they sell from renewable sources, which are more expensive ...

States To Tackle Income Taxes While Congress and the president recently hiked taxes for 77 percent of the nation’s taxpayers, proposals for sweeping tax cuts continue to gain momentum at the state level. In the new year governors and influential state lawmakers from Indiana, Louisiana, Nebraska, North Carolina, Ohio ...

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 ...

It’s the New Year, the pre-dawn of President Barack Obama’s second term – in which he is free to be more “ flexible ,” and is resolved to engage in even more illegal, unilateral power grabs. Long on the Obama-Leftist power grab hit list has been the Internet. Pre-Obama, the ‘Net was just about regulation-free – and thus ...

What passes today as a “debate” over privacy lacks agreed-upon terms of reference, rational arguments, or concrete goals. Though the stars are aligning for a market in privacy products and services, those who believe that rapidly evolving information technologies are eroding privacy regularly pitch their arguments in the direction ...

The election results have been certified, the fiscal cliff has been averted, and the world didn’t end. Now state lawmakers are heading back to their state capitols to begin their 2013 legislative sessions. States are expected to face many important issues this year, including Medicaid expansion and balancing their budgets ...

One of Utah’s most ambitious municipal broadband programs is facing serious subscribership and funding problems. The Utah Telecommunications Open Infrastructure Agency (UTOPIA), a municipal broadband program organized in 2002 by a group of communities in the Wasatch Front area of the state, is facing massive debt, low enrollment ...

In the Fiscal Cliff negotiations, we have heard ad nauseum from the Left about making “The Rich” – the 1% ( oops, they now mean 2% ) – “pay their fair share” of federal income taxes. When it comes to the nation’s Internet bandwidth-using 1%, however, many on the Left are demanding the 99% pay for the vast majority of the ...

One need not look far to see the federal government and state governments are moving further apart on their approaches to energy policy. More states are looking at ways to encourage the development of affordable domestic energy sources such as natural gas and away from picking winners and losers through arbitrary renewable ...

( Editor's note: The threatened blackout described below was averted when the parties involved reached an 11th hour agreement late on Nov. 29, 2012. ) Charter Cable customers accustomed to viewing Channel 8 (WOOD-TV) and Channel 15 (WTVS) in Michigan’s Kent County viewing vicinity may find the two stations blacked out if a broadcast ...

The Obama administration maintains that pushing hospitals and physicians to adopt electronic medical records will improve efficiency, increase patient safety, and reduce health care costs. But as more providers transition to EMRs, there has been an unexpected consequence: Billions of dollars in higher costs for Medicare, private ...

More universities are herding into massive open online courses, or MOOCs. Just this week, the University of Texas, announced it would, joining the likes of Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Virginia. Drs. Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok are economics professors at George Mason University ...