The Heartland Institute

Perhaps no governor this year has done more to encourage supporters of fiscal responsibility and upset supporters of spending as usual than Republican Chris Christie of New Jersey. Standing with Christie is his director of policy, Gregg Edwards. Before joining the Christie administration, Edwards ran the Center for Policy Research ...

Just two minutes. Barely two minutes after receiving a bill to impose a " millionaire's tax," New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) vetoed it." While I have little doubt that the sponsors and supporters of this bill sincerely believe that the state can tax its way out of this financial crisis, I believe that this bill does nothing ...

Online retailers Amazon.com and Overstock.com recently dropped hundreds of affiliate advertisers in California, Hawaii, North Carolina, and Rhode Island because of new laws requiring Internet retailers to collect state sales taxes if they have local affiliate advertisers. Amazon.com in June notified Hawaii, North Carolina, and Rhode ...

Voters in Davenport, Iowa overwhelmingly rejected a measure to use a local sales tax to fund a college scholarship program that would have been run by the city. Nearly 60 percent of voters in the March election cast ballots against sending 30 percent of the proceeds from a 1 percent citywide sales tax to pay for the scholarships ...

Virginia taxpayers have won another round in their fight to hold down transportation-related taxes. A special session called by Gov. Tim Kaine (D) to raise taxes and fees for transportation ended in July with no tax hikes. In a meeting with reporters, Kaine complained, "Some of these [lawmakers] are really in a hole ...

Barely three months after the Virginia Supreme Court struck down hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes and fees intended to fund transportation, Gov. Tim Kaine (D) launched a campaign to raise taxes and fees to replace the ones ruled unconstitutional. In early June Kaine announced a plan to raise the retail sales tax ...

For some lawmakers, switching their states from an ad valorem tax on smokeless tobacco products to a unit-based tax is a matter of fairness. For others it is a matter of stabilizing revenue. For others it's a matter of health. For a variety of reasons, growing numbers of lawmakers are concluding ad valorem taxes--excise ...

Complaints from thousands of angry taxpayers and infighting among county commissioners have held off nearly $890 million of proposed tax and fee hikes in Cook County, Illinois. Cook County Board President Todd Stroger (D), who leads the nation's third-largest county government, had proposed raising revenues by $888 million. Taxpayers ...

Just as nations compete economically, so do the individual states within the United States. In fact, states are much more likely to lose jobs and people to other states than to other nations. With this in mind, economists Arthur Laffer and Stephen Moore have released Rich States, Poor States , published by the American ...

Tax hikes proposed by Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley (D) would send tax burdens up and business competitiveness down, according to economist Curtis Dubay of the nonpartisan Tax Foundation, based in Washington, DC. "Lost in the rush to increase taxes is the crushing impact these tax increases will have on Maryland's competitiveness ...

Alaska officials have dropped their fight to build the infamous "Bridge to Nowhere," a proposed project that millions of Americans viewed as a symbol of political pork-barrel spending at its worst. The late-September announcement by Gov. Sarah Palin (R) represented a big victory for advocates of fiscal responsibility in state ...

Citizens of North Carolina's Mecklenburg County will have a chance this November to overturn a special sales tax that funds mass transit. Opponents of the half-cent sales tax levy, which generates about $70 million annually, gathered 48,669 valid signatures on petitions calling for a referendum to repeal the tax, enough to ...

Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich (D) has tacked more than $1 billion onto the record tax hike proposal he announced during his State of the State address on March 7. Three weeks after announcing a plan for a gross receipts tax on businesses to raise more than $6 billion, and a $1 billion payroll tax on employers who do ...

A judge in St. Louis County, Missouri has ruled that trustees for a local fire protection district may ask voters to raise the district's maximum tax rate, but not to lower it. Judge James R. Hartenbach ordered a tax cut referendum off the April 3 ballot. The referendum would have given voters the chance to reduce ...

Since 2004, when Wisconsin became the first state to offer residents an income tax break for donating an organ, 10 other states have adopted similar legislation: Georgia in 2004; Arkansas, Iowa, Minnesota, New Mexico, North Dakota, and Utah in 2005; and Idaho, Mississippi, and New York in 2006, according to Scott Becher, chief ...

As chairman of organ transplantation at University of Wisconsin Hospital in Madison, Dr. Hans Sollinger has seen hundreds of individuals and families undergo financial and emotional stress after donating an organ. So when he learned state Rep. Steve Wieckert (R-Appleton) was working on legislation to ease the financial burden ...

Use of private firefighters and paramedics has been a longstanding practice in Arizona, where Scottsdale-based Rural/Metro Corporation runs 37 fire stations, making it the second-largest fire department in the state. Rural/Metro, established in the 1950s, has 8,000 employees in 24 states. Its main service is providing emergency ...

The former mayor of a city of 7,000 people trounced Alaska's incumbent governor to win the Republican Party nomination for the November general election. Gov. Frank Murkowski, characterized by critics as a pork-loving big spender, garnered only 19 percent of the votes cast in the August 21 Republican primary election. Sarah ...

A proposal to impose a bed tax on all 74 hospitals that operate in partnership with the New Jersey state government failed in June when state Senate President Richard Codey (D-West Orange) declared to reporters, "The hospital bed tax, it's in the morgue and it has a tag on its toe." Gov. Jon Corzine (D) had proposed ...

Thanks to lawmakers who in June enacted a package of tax and spending reforms that were quickly signed into law by Gov. Donald L. Carcieri (R), Rhode Islanders now have an optional flat-rate income tax, tighter caps on property taxes, the eventual elimination of an automobile excise tax, lower capital gains taxes, and controls ...