The Heartland Institute

When Fountain, Colorado Eastside Elementary School’s principal told parents Jeremy and Kathryn Mathis that their child, Coy, had to stop using the girls’ bathroom, they sued. Coy is a six-year-old first grader, born a boy, who self-identifies as a girl. School officials offered Coy the options of using the boys’ bathroom ...

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 ...

The Colorado House of Representatives Transportation and Energy Committee is holding hearings tomorrow on legislation to dramatically increase the amount of expensive renewable power consumers are forced to purchase. Under current law, rural electric customers in Colorado must purchase 10 percent of their electricity from specially ...

Today is the big day for the Arkansas Medicaid reform , and states across the country will be paying attention to what’s done in the legislature there. The plan failed to capture the supermajority needed to come out of the state House, where it came in six votes short of the 75 necessary for passage. The actual legislation ...

Colorado legislators are bucking the national trend and considering a proposal that would boost the state’s renewable portfolio standard (RPS). The RPS requires utilities to obtain a specified percentage of their power from intermittent renewable sources by a certain date. Twenty-two of the 29 states with such mandates in place ...

Coloradoans who sued to stop the nation’s first voucher program run by a school district will appeal to the state supreme court after an appeals court ruled 2-1 in favor of the program. The Feb. 28 decision reversed a previous ruling against the program on grounds it sends state money to religious schools. The Colorado Court ...

Before Bill Ritter became Governor of Colorado, state regulators required utilities to deliver power to ratepayers at the least possible cost. Ritter’s New Energy Economy changed the rules so that clean energy took priority above affordable energy. In fact, it seemed not to matter whether the electricity generated by these “new ...

Colorado is currently considering whether to expand Medicaid under President Obama’s health care law, which radically restructures federal subsidy programs for medical care. The state has decided to create an ObamaCare state-run health insurance exchange, and many individuals currently covered by Medicaid will be better off with ...

Troubled by the questionable use of tobacco-tax revenue on grants to fund advocacy for local smoking bans, Colorado lawmakers have decided to ask the Joint Budget Committee to make state health department officials—who disburse tobacco tax money—report those grants as budgetary line items for better tracking and oversight. A legislative ...

Challenges of cost, control, and quality have caused some Colorado education leaders to take a second look at the state’s adoption of national academic standards. A pair of December 6 meetings in Denver opened discussions regarding Common Core standards more than two years after state officials adopted them. The Colorado State ...

In the latest setback for the renewable-energy sector, the Weld County District Attorney’s Office in Colorado is investigating Abound Solar for possible criminal violations. Although the District Attorney has yet to file charges, investigators are looking into whether the company engaged in securities fraud, consumer fraud, and ...

Wind power generation has been generously subsidized since the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act of 1978. After 35 years of increasingly lucrative subsidies, wind power generation has become the most preferentially treated industry in the energy sector. Yet wind power produces only 2.9 percent of the United States’ total ...

Over the past month, I’ve received more than a dozen emails that go something like this: “I’m a conservative, but my friend who has cancer [or some other serious disease] says she’s worried about losing Obamacare’s protection for pre-existing conditions. Should I be worried about her if Obamacare goes away?” In the interests ...

As Congress decides whether to allow the national capital gains tax rate to increase at the beginning of next year, states across the country are debating whether to change their own capital gains taxes. These are taxes paid by individuals and corporations on their capital gains, or profits realized when investors sell a capital ...

The United States has the highest corporate tax rate among the 34 nations in the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) in addition to being one of the few nations still using a “worldwide system.” These are two reasons the United States is in dire need of fundamental corporate tax reform. Under the ...

Federal land management officials are overstepping their authority by imposing unjustified land-use restrictions in the name of protecting sage grouse populations, members of five Colorado county commissions and two Colorado conservation districts agued in a letter to the federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM). Officials from Garfield ...

Legislative economists are expecting a little more revenue for the Colorado state budget than they had projected in June, but they’re tempering their expectations because of concerns about global economic and political uncertainties. Gov. John Hickenlooper’s (D) budget chief attributed some of the bump in revenue to surging oil ...

Since the 2006–07 financial crisis the Federal Reserve has taken several steps to stimulate the economy and unfreeze credit markets, which had ground to a halt after the bursting of the housing bubble. The Federal Reserve launched its current monetary strategy in 2007, lowering the federal funds rate from 5.25 percent to effectively ...

Recent moratoria on uranium mining in states such as Virginia and Arizona have sparked debates about whether the benefits of uranium outweigh its costs. Currently, approximately 20 percent of U.S. electricity is generated by fuel derived from uranium, an extremely dense, naturally occurring metal. Through nuclear fission, this ...

A Colorado man has recovered a $7 million verdict from a microwave popcorn manufacturer after the man was diagnosed with “microwave popcorn lung.” The man ate two bags of popcorn daily for years and claims there should have been a warning on the bag. The artificial butter used on the popcorn formerly contained dicetyl ...