The Heartland Institute

The Sacramento Kings of the National Basketball Association have a new billionaire team owner, and that billionaire will have a new stadium for his team, courtesy of local taxpayers. Two days after the NBA rejected a bid to move the Kings to Seattle, the Maloof family agreed to sell the Kings to a new group of investors ...

Another secretive budget is in the near future as California Democrats passed 37 empty budget “spot bills” Monday. Assemblyman Bob Blumenfield (D-Los Angeles), the author of AB 74, the budget bills and chairman of the Assembly Budget Committee, called the bills “budget vehicles.” Blumenfield said Republicans began to care about ...

San Jose State University faculty recently decided the best way to address scientific criticisms of alarmist global warming theory was to burn the books containing such criticisms . Pierre Gosselin, administrator of the No Tricks Zone website, pointed out disturbing parallels between the book burning at San Jose State and book ...

The California Supreme Court has given a victory to taxpayers in its unanimous ruling that the City of Long Beach must recognize class claims to refund illegally collected telephone taxes. McWilliams v. City of Long Beach revolved around the city’s refusal to refund the tax except to individual taxpayers who demanded their ...

This Obamacare thing is not going as well as some had hoped. Democratic senators, at a caucus meeting with White House officials, expressed concerns on Thursday about how the Obama administration was carrying out the health care law they adopted three years ago. Democrats in both houses of Congress said some members of ...

Immediately after discovering the body of Canadian tourist Elisa Lam in the hotel roof’s water tank, fire officials shut off the water supply to the Cecil Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. City health inspectors tested the water supply and found it free of biohazards. Two hotel guests, Steven and Gloria Cott, are nevertheless ...

Former Lodi, California mayor James McCarty, 86, and his brother, Robert, 78, have sued Lodi attorney Russell Humphrey’s office for allegedly not complying with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). The McCarty brothers’ suit might not be newsworthy except that Humphrey, a private attorney suing on behalf of a single ...

The California High-Speed Rail Authority is overestimating ridership by 65 to 77 percent and will need $124 million to $373 million a year from taxpayers to cover its operating costs and financial losses, according to a new study by Reason Foundation . In 2008, voters were promised a bullet train trip from Los Angeles to ...

In Dostoevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov,” a priest recalls the words of a man who confessed, “The more I love mankind in general, the less I love people in particular.” We can all think of people like that—folks of varied political persuasions who rally to “save” humanity but become so consumed by their cause that they lose ...

According to Governing magazine, there were 28 public bankruptcies in 2011 and 2012. Although that number fell short of many experts’ predictions, it still represents a significant increase in defaults. Of the dozens of cities considering bankruptcy, Stockton, California is the largest and has received the most attention. A recent ...

The California high-speed rail project cannot be delivered at the cost promised to taxpayers, is based upon a business plan incapable of delivering on its legal requirements and is justified by proponents based upon unachievable benefits Reason Foundation’s 2008 report, The California High Speed Rail Proposal: A Due Diligence Report ...

Taxpayer-subsidized SolarWorld laid off 40 workers at its Hillsboro, Oregon plant earlier this year, marking nearly 300 workers laid off company-wide after state officials invited the company to apply for up to $100 million in subsidies and the company accepted at least $27 million in subsidies. Company’s Downhill Spiral SolarWorld ...

Employees of the City of Irvine, Calif., received total compensation averaging $143,691 in 2012, according to a study published by the California Public Policy Center. Median total compensation, which means half of the Irvine city employees received less than this amount, and half received more, was $133,782 during 2012. These ...

James Capretta makes an argument on the Medicaid strategy states ought to use that is worth considering and warns against accepting the Arkansas deal without knowing what’s in it: The GOP governors engaged in these direct negotiations with the White House are playing a loser’s game, and throwing away a historic opportunity ...

What if most of the public employee compensation enhancements of the past decade or more in California were based on inaccurately optimistic government financial statements? Or to be blunt, what if government decision makers incorrectly thought they could afford these compensation enhancements because the information they relied ...

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 ...

In January, State Superintendent Tom Torlakson recommended $1 billion in changes to the state’s battery of tests so California’s 4 million students will have to complete tasks such as writing paragraphs and multiple-step math problems. He also recommended suspending most state tests for a year as California, along with 44 other ...

When people follow rules, they don’t expect to be penalized years later for having done so. But that’s what’s happening in California, where state tax officials have decided to retroactively apply taxes that small business owners and investors were told they would not have to pay. The Franchise Tax Board’s move “has the potential ...

After teaching Spanish for many years, I was asked by my school district to teach English as a Second Language. Teaching Spanish, I was told, meant teaching a second language, so the process should be similar. It wasn’t. I didn’t realize the demographics of the learners would present such a profound teaching challenge. My ...

The U.S. Supreme Court agreed with the Los Angeles County Flood Control District that it did not have to implement special pollution abatement plans for water flowing from concrete-encased storm water channels into more natural portions of the Los Angeles and San Gabriel rivers. The Supreme Court ruled the U.S. Circuit Court ...