The Heartland Institute

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 ...

South Dakota state Rep. Jim Bolin, a retired teacher, introduced two bills to limit Common Core national education standards. Both failed by narrow votes in March. Bolin sees the standards, which were adopted by South Dakota’s board of education in 2010, as “an attack on the local authority of people to run their own schools ...

Starting July 1, South Dakota schools can appoint a trained person to carry a gun on campus now that Gov. Dennis Daugaard signed the first-of-its-kind “sentinel bill” on March 8. General concern over the bill when first proposed gave way to widespread acceptance in the legislature after several key elements were added during ...

Government biofuel programs are causing the destruction of America’s grasslands, scientists report in a newly published study in the peer-reviewed Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . Spurred on by biofuel programs, America’s grasslands are disappearing at a pace comparable to deforestation rates in Brazil, Malaysia ...

So why is it that the governors of Alabama, Alaska, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming have all said no to a state-implemented health insurance exchange? Scott Walker’s letter explaining ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 product that is quickly changing the telecom industry and how people communicate is voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) calling, where voice and multimedia communication are conducted and transmitted over Internet protocol (IP) networks, such as the Internet. VoIP subscriptions have grown rapidly in recent years: According to ...

We’ve documented in the past the concerns among America’s physicians about how they will adapt to a new reality under President Barack Obama’s health care law, particularly considering the need for more than 30,000 primary care physicians by 2015 even under the most optimistic assumptions of the law’s effects. Now comes a new ...

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), previously known as the Food Stamp program, has become one of the fastest-growing welfare programs of the U.S. government. SNAP is administered by the Department of Agriculture, and the benefits are distributed by individual states. Currently, SNAP is the fourth-largest means ...

Since the late 1980s the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) has conducted monetary policy primarily by setting a target for the nominal overnight federal funds rate. In late 2008 the FOMC set the target at zero. It has since indicated that it expects the target to remain at zero until late 2014. Should this happen, the ...

Tax increment financing has become a popular tool for encouraging economic development in municipalities across the country. Originally designed to help blighted areas attract businesses, tax increment financing, or “TIF,” has quickly become the subsidy of choice for towns seeking to spur development. TIF allows municipalities to ...

Yesterday, at the Republican National Convention, former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice gave a superb speech covering many important issues. One issue she touched on that regrettably hasn’t been talked about enough this campaign season is education reform. For the United States to have sustained economic prosperity ...

Since the 2007-2008 financial crisis, legislators in the United States and across the world have proposed new taxes on certain financial transactions, including securities trading and stock transactions. For proponents of these financial transaction taxes the goal is twofold: to raise revenue for the national governments through ...

The Obama administration’s Federal Communications Commission has undertaken several efforts to increase its regulatory power over the Internet by reclassifying broadband access services from their current status as an informational service to a Title II telecommunications service. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski launched a proposal ...

Nearly 50 million U.S. adults—more than a fifth of the total adult population—smoke cigarettes. After vigorous public health efforts including taxes, education, and outright bans on smoking, the percentage of Americans who smoke has fallen by almost half in the past four decades. In recent years, however, the number of Americans ...

Few taxes imposed by state and local governments are more controversial than the estate tax, popularly referred to as the “death tax.” Estate taxes are levies on property transferred from a deceased person’s estate to relatives or other parties. The estate tax rate is scheduled to automatically increase, and the amount excluded ...