The Heartland Institute

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

According to a report by the Texas Transportation Institute, the cost of urban traffic congestion, converted to a dollar value, quintupled between 1982 and 2007. Although congestion costs have fallen recently due to the recession and decreased economic activity, the cost of urban congestion remains more than $100 billion a year ...

With the nation’s economy still in the doldrums, unemployment compensation funds in many states have become insolvent. One reason is that waste and fraud plague the system. In some states nearly 20 percent of all benefit payments result from error or fraud, according to the National Center for Policy Analysis. A July 2012 ...

This primer from the New York Law School and the Advanced Communication Law and Policy Institute discuss current trends in telecom policy from state governments and the new trend away from traditional forms of communications and the new law emerging because of this. ...

The “digital divide” is a term that has been used to characterize a gap between “information haves and have-nots,” or in other words, between those Americans who use or have access to telecommunications and information technologies and those who do not. One important subset of the digital divide debate concerns high-speed Internet ...

Corporate Income Taxes Problem All 50 states currently have a higher combined federal and state corporate tax rate than France, whose rate is third-highest among OECD countries 1. Although corporate income taxes make up a fairly minor part of state tax revenue, they have a harmful impact on economic behavior. Nonetheless, many ...

In response to the subprime crisis and Great Recession central banks in advanced economies have cut interest rates towards zero and increased monetary accommodation to step-up domestic growth. In this paper I attempt to describe the unintended consequences of the low interest rate policies in emerging markets. I argue based on ...

The food stamp program is due for reauthorization as part of a new farm bill. It is the second most expensive means-tested aid program, increasing from $19.8 billon in 2000 to $84.6 billion in 2011, and President Barack Obama has proposed a budget to keep food stamp spending at sharply elevated levels for the next decade ...

In states and municipalities across the country, the high cost of traditional defined-benefit public pensions has become a hot-button issue as unfunded liabilities have raced out of control. These increasing liabilities are further complicated by the fact that in many instances the regulators controlling pension funds have overestimated ...