The Heartland Institute

[ Below is an excerpt of Heartland Research Fellow Joy Pullmann's May 22, 2013 testimony before the Wisconsin Legislature's Joint Committee on Education in opposition to the state adopting Common Core education standards. For the full testimony, please click on the PDF link above . ] Common Core has never been pilot tested anywhere ...

[ Below is an excerpt of Heartland Research Fellow Joy Pullmann's May 15, 2013 testimony before the Pennsylvania State Senate's Education Committee in opposition to the state adopting Common Core education standards. For the full testimony, please click on the PDF link above . ] Common Core supporters typically avoid two preliminary ...

This Policy Brief summarizes past research and presents new analysis showing how a proposal called the Taxpayer Savings Grant Program (TSGP) would enable the state of Texas to comply with its constitutional mandate to “establish and make suitable provision for the support and maintenance of an efficient system of public free ...

Common Core State Standards for K-12 schools were adopted without debate by every state but Alaska, Nebraska, Texas, and Virginia in 2010, part of the price of getting federal dollars under the Obama administration’s “Race to the Top” program. Now educators, parents, and policymakers are taking a closer look at what they agreed ...

A new report written by one of the nation’s leading authorities on groundwater hydrology and nuclear energy says uranium mining in Virginia can take place safely and with minimal environmental impact. At issue is a plan to lift a moratorium on uranium mining that has been in place in Virginia since 1982. The Coles Hill uranium ...

This essay is the first of a series of Heartland Policy Briefs by the author on entitlement reform. Soon after World War II, U.S. federal government spending as a percent of gross domestic product (GDP) stabilized at around 20 percent. It remained there until President Barack Obama took office. That period covered close to ...

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s Act 10 is working. Since its implementation in July 2011 to reduce state spending, the state budget has been balanced, property taxes have been reduced, and state revenue collections are surging, all for the first time in a decade or more. Dozens of school districts were able to balance their ...

Plans to build streetcar lines in San Antonio are based on several critical fallacies, including claims that streetcars are superior to buses in their ability to attract riders and that streetcars promote economic development. In fact, streetcars are slower, less flexible, less capable of moving large numbers of people, and far ...

A new report from PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC), titled Too Late for Two Degrees? Low Carbon Economy Index 2012, claims nations must dramatically reduce carbon dioxide emissions and the carbon intensity of their economies to cap global warming at an acceptable level of 2 degrees Celsius above “pre-industrial levels.” The report ...

Sometimes, it seems as though the debate over school reform takes place in an alternate universe where time passes but nothing really changes. Complaints about the quality of public education were widespread in the 1980s and even in the 1950s and before, and they sound surprisingly similar to those heard today. Thankfully, new ...

On November 6, San Antonio voters will decide whether to increase their sales tax by 1/8th cent to generate $280 million over a period of eight years. Revenue from the tax increase would fund a new city educational corporation. The city council would appoint the executive director and board of directors for the corporation ...

On November 6, voters in San Antonio, Texas will vote on whether the city should own and operate a network of early childhood education centers. The initiative is controversial, and rightly so. There are many reasons to question whether such a network, which would operate in competition with existing private and public day ...

By selecting House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) as his running mate, Republican candidate Mitt Romney reframed the 2012 presidential election as a contest between Ryan’s 2013 proposed budget, which was adopted by the entire Republican House, and President Barack Obama’s 2013 proposed budget, which can be taken as ...

Unless there is a substantial change in leadership in Washington in the next election, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) will go into effect as planned. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the measure as constitutional in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, Sup. Ct. Docket Nos. 11-393 and ...

For insurers, the most salient fact about tobacco use can be summarized simply: overwhelming scientificevidence indicates that all widely used forms of tobacco harm human health. A significant body of evidence also indicates tobacco use correlates strongly with other risky behaviors. According to the Centers for Disease Control ...

Wisconsin Act 10, Gov. Scott Walker’s landmark budget and unionization reform bill, has allowed school districts across the state to balance budgets without teacher layoffs, according to a new report from The Heartland Institute. “Act 10 virtually eliminated [the state’s] $3.6 billion budget deficit ... and provided school districts ...

On December 12, 2009, the California Air Resources Board (CARB), a subdivision of the California Environmental Protection Agency, published its final rule to reduce diesel exhaust emissions in the state, the “Goods Movement Emission Reduction Plan” (GMERP). The controversial plan set up a draconian, regressive tax, one of the ...

Introduction The economic recession that began in 2007 exposed and aggravated a government fiscal crisis that had been brewing for many years at the national, state, and municipal levels of the U.S. Slow or negative economic growth, falling housing values, and rising government spending came together to make it impossible to ...

The Heartland Institute, a free-market think tank whose researchers have questioned government subsidies to sports stadiums since the mid 1980s, has released a new Policy Brief proposing fan ownership of teams as a solution to “sports stadium madness.” Author Joseph Bast , president of the institute, notes “sports stadium subsidies ...

Texas’s franchise tax—better known as the “margins tax”—does not work as advertised. The tax has not achieved any of the goals its creators set out for it. In the 2012 legislative session, the Texas legislature should consider replacing it with some other means of raising revenue ... or with nothing at all. This paper describes ...