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 ...

Jordan Visser was not thriving in his Arizona public school. After a round of arguments with his school, Jordan's parents learned of Arizona's education savings accounts (ESAs), which deposit part of state funds set aside for the child's education into an account parents control and can use for any educational purchase. The ...

Study: Arizona’s renewable mandate should give cause for concern for new commission (Boston, MA) In January, as he launched his term as Arizona Corporation Commission’s (ACC) new chairman, Bob Stump discussed renewable energy policy by announcing he would “refuse to bet on, or cheerlead for, any one form of technology,” and ...

The stereotype that homeschooled kids do school in their pajamas may actually indicate better mental health. A new study finds that homeschooled kids sleep 90 minutes more, on average, than their non-homeschooled peers. Homeschooled kids also sleep in later than public school students, which actually better fits a teen's natural ...

Secret negotiations over employment contracts between union representatives and government officials are the norm in nearly every state in the union. This keeps taxpayers in the dark about how compensation packages are awarded and stops journalists from knowing what goes on behind closed doors. In a report released by the Goldwater ...

When is a compromise not a compromise? When only one side thinks it’s a compromise. The Obama administration said Friday that it will not provide broad exceptions to the contraception mandate in its signature healthcare law. The Health and Human Services Department rejected calls to let any employer opt out of the mandate ...

So that Medicaid expansion – it’s very tempting, isn’t it? All those Medicaid dollars just sitting there, free of charge from the federal coffers … and you get to claim you’ve expanded coverage for hundreds of thousands of people in an instant, at no cost to the state. It all sounds too good to be true. That’s because ...

Federal Bureau of Reclamation officials opened up turbines and bypass tubes in the Glen Canyon Dam in northern Arizona, unleashing a simulated flood designed to mimic a natural flood in the Colorado River and Grand Canyon ecosystems. The simulated flood, which began Nov. 19, increased the Colorado River’s flow from 8,000 cubic ...

Arizona consumers can expect higher electricity costs as a result of new EPA restrictions on three Eastern Arizona power plants. Arizona state environmental officials say the EPA restrictions are too costly and will provide no perceptible environmental benefits. EPA Rejects Arizona Plan The Arizona Department of Environmental Quality ...

Arizona Department of Environmental Quality officials denounced the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s decision to impose unnecessarily strict air pollution controls at the AEPCO Apache Generating Station near Benson, the APS Cholla Power Plant near Joseph City, and the SRP Coronado Generating Station near St. Johns under a ...

There is a strong connection between a state’s rate of entrepreneurship and declines in poverty. Statistical analysis of all 50 states indicates that states with a larger share of entrepreneurs had bigger declines in poverty. In fact, comparing states during the last economic boom—from 2001 to 2007—data show that for every 1 ...

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 ...

Much of the conversation during this election season has revolved around the word “access,” particularly within the health care space. What you ought to understand by now is that when most liberal politicians say “access,” what they mean is “taxpayer subsidies.” This is not exclusively the terminology of the left, but it is ...

This fall, Arizona’s unique system of education savings accounts turned two years old. After beginning quietly with 75 children in September 2011, the program enrolled more than 400 students this school year. In 2013-14, 200,000 children will be eligible. As the accounts (called “Empowerment Scholarship Accounts”) draw more attention ...

Texas and Arizona are poised to reap the benefits of domestic natural gas production, as Mexico is building new pipelines to import natural gas from the two U.S. states. Central Economy Stifling Production Mexico is blessed with some of the largest natural gas deposits in the world. Nevertheless, Pemex, the government-owned natural ...

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 ...

Many Arizonans, like many Americans, believe their state “underfunds” education. In fact, writes Jonathan Butcher in a policy report for the Goldwater Institute, Arizona education spending has mirrored national education spending by rising consistently, in inflation-adjusted dollars, for several decades. The evidence on education spending ...

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 ...