The Heartland Institute

Harnessing modern technology to tailor education personally and make it efficient is new and greatly unsettled territory. States, schools, entrepreneurs, and families are testing variations on many programs to see what works for them. Every state offers K-12 students some option for digital learning, but many programs are poorly ...

Sometime in the next few days, Florida Gov. Rick Scott will have to decide whether to sign or veto HB 7117 , a multipronged renewable energy and conservation bill that provides tax credits for renewable energy technology investment and renewable fuel infrastructure. If signed and implemented, the bill would cost taxpayers $16 ...

Louisiana legislators have proposed an education reform that is garnering significant national attention: the Parent Trigger. The legislation, first passed in California, is currently being drafted in a dozen other states. The Louisiana Parent Trigger would allow a simple majority of parents at a school to “trigger” its conversion ...

As states have been debating whether to implement a health insurance exchange, a key deterrent has been that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services had released only draft rules. HHS now has released final insurance exchange rules, and many states are left with questions unanswered or suspicions confirmed. According ...

Catastrophe bonds are insurance-linked securities that offset major costs to taxpayers and insurers caused by natural disasters such as hurricanes and earthquakes. Cat bonds, as they are known, work differently from other types of bonds. Investors lose their entire principal in the event of a catastrophe that meets the terms ...

As the 2012 elections approach, it is an appropriate time to review the president’s record on education policy. Several prominent observers have done so recently. The president’s education policies seem to please no one extremely well. Even his teacher union allies have publicly criticized his support for policies such as charter ...

To avoid high U.S. corporate tax rates, U.S.-based companies operating internationally have kept their foreign earnings in subsidiaries overseas rather than bringing them back to the United States. They do this because U.S. marginal tax rates are, by some measures, the highest in the developed world. Some financial experts say ...

The most heavily debated element of President Barack Obama’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) is the constitutionality of the individual health insurance mandate, which requires every citizen, with few exceptions, to purchase health insurance. The matter was debated by several district and appellate courts, and ...

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) requires states to expand Medicaid eligibility to all individuals whose income is less than 133 percent of the federal poverty level. States that fail to meet this requirement will no longer receive federal Medicaid grants. Because the federal government cannot legally force ...

Seven states currently offer special-needs students the opportunity to take their public funds to a private school, and at least 10 more states are currently considering similar legislation. The expense and extent of education services targeted at students diagnosed as disabled or with a learning disability such as dyslexia or ...

Hydraulic fracturing has enabled profitable extraction of oil and gas in diverse areas of the country. As a result, many states sitting atop the country’s shale formations are reconsidering the way they tax these resources, to fill budget holes. Many of these debates are occurring in states with unconventional deposits and where ...

Illinois has the third-highest workers’ compensation insurance rates of any state in the United States. In Illinois, provision of workers’ comp is compulsory for all employers, and the state government does not provide insurance through a state fund. Employers have multiple options in purchasing insurance: They may insure through ...

The recent discovery of vast deposits of oil and natural gas trapped in shale rock formations has revolutionized our nation’s short-term, mid-term, and long-term energy outlook. For example, proven natural gas reserves in the United States rose by 40 percent between 2004 and 2009. At the same time, new technological advancements ...

Several states, including Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Nevada, New Jersey, South Dakota, and Virginia, are considering making teacher tenure more difficult to obtain or replacing it with rolling contracts. Teacher unions argue tenure is necessary for K-12 teachers to protect them from being arbitrarily fired. They also suggest ...

The Environmental Protection Agency’s release of its draft ”Investigation of Ground Water Contamination near Pavillion, Wyoming” in December 2011 has brought much attention to alleged risks hydraulic fracturing poses to groundwater resources. When considering regulatory actions to prevent such contamination, however, it is important ...

In the mid-1980s, high premium costs and a tidal wave of auto insurance litigation led to vast public outrage against auto insurers. Under California’s referendum process, voters in 1986 narrowly approved Proposition 103, which completely remade the state’s auto insurance system. Insurers were required to roll back their rates ...

A common proposal for remedying the increasing cost of health care in the United States has been the call for a single-payer health care system. In such a system, the financing of both health services and health insurance coverage originates from one single source: the government. Single-payer advocates argue all Americans have ...

For more than a decade, members of Congress have proposed various bills to establish a federal “backstop,” “catastrophe fund,” or “guarantee mechanism” for private losses in cases of disaster. Most recently, several members of Congress from California, including Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA), and Rep. John ...

Florida legislators have proposed an education reform that is garnering significant national attention: the Parent Trigger. The legislation, first passed in California, is currently being drafted in a dozen other states. The Florida Parent Trigger would allow a simple majority of parents at a school to “trigger” one of three ...

Reauthorization of the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) has been a political football in recent years, with Congress unwilling to commit to reform. Since its statutory authorization expired in 2008, NFIP has been kept running through a series of short-term reauthorizations, most recently in December 2011, when the program ...