The Heartland Institute

There have been numerous press reports about the expansion of micro housing, and expectations that Americans will be reducing the size of their houses. As the nation trepidatiously seeks to emerge from the deepest economic decline since the 1930s, normalcy seems to be returning to house sizes. According to the latest new single ...

Although Democrats and Republicans largely agree that No Child Left Behind, the largest federal education law, is a shambles, House Republicans and Senate Democrats have different ideas about how to revise the law. “It’s a matter of the conservative philosophy of localities and states being closest to the child and being empowered ...

Pension problems facing Pennsylvania school districts have come home to roost. As we wrote in a recent blog: “Unless there is agreement on pension reform legislation . . . most school districts in Pennsylvania face ruinous increases in pension funding.” To handle this increase, districts will have to raise taxes, lay off personnel ...

Global warming alarmists have been caught doctoring the results of a widely cited paper asserting there is a 97 percent scientific consensus regarding human-caused global warming. After taking a closer look at the paper, investigative journalists report the authors’ claims of a 97 percent consensus relied on them misclassifying ...

Taco Bell®, long a young person’s favorite place for inexpensive and tasty late-night snacks and likely an occasional target of late-night robberies, now finds itself on the wrong end of a lawsuit for alleged stealing--brought by a prisoner in the supermax prison in Florence, Colorado. One Gary Cole, whose fellow inmates include ...

Less than one month after Detroit emergency manager Kevyn Orr issued a report declaring the city’s finances to be in worse shape than nearly anyone suspected when he assumed the job in March, Detroit has defaulted on a scheduled debt payment of $39.7 million. The default happened June 14, the same day Orr issued a debt ...

Although frustrated by this month’s three-vote defeat of a bill to reconsider Common Core national education standards or related tests, former Kansas Board of Education member Walt Chappell is resolute: “ House Bill 2289 [to repeal Common Core] is still alive.” The Common Core opponent expects a repeal bill to be re-introduced ...

Also on the food front, you just knew this was going to happen back when Budweiser®, Schlitz®, and Pabst Blue Ribbon® brand beers became no longer good enough for the cognoscenti and everybody started getting into microbrews: more brands, more logos, and sooner or later the marketing people will start running out of ideas ...

A much-anticipated carbon tax debate in Washington D.C. last Thursday brought some much needed clarity to assertions that conservatives should or indeed do support a carbon tax. The timing of the debate couldn’t have been better, as Senate leaders announced on that same day the Senate will hold hearings on a carbon tax next ...

Not everything worth doing should be done by the federal government. That may be the understatement of the millennium, but it’s the key to understanding why the current push for “common core” standards in education is a bad idea. Common Core is the latest wrinkle in a 20-year trend to raise standards and increase accountability ...

The latest polling on Obamacare is the worst it has ever been, with majorities of Americans saying they expect their family will be worse off under it and majorities saying it would be better to go back to the pre-Obamacare health care system. A Fox News poll found only 26 percent of voters say their health care situation ...

Wednesday's ed news U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan will let states postpone tying student test scores to teacher evaluations for one year as Common Core tests phase in. Seventy percent of U.S. K-12 schools don’t have the bandwidth for Common Core tests . Forty members of Congress introduce a constitutional amendment to ...

An energetic group of medical doctors, nuclear physicists, astrophysicists, climate scientists, and just plain folks desiring to get up close and personal with some of our nation's greatest scientists will be meeting at the Houston Marriott South on Saturday and Sunday July 13 and 14. The group, Doctors for Disaster Preparedness ...

The California State Assembly overwhelmingly rejected a bill that would have banned oil and natural gas fracking in the state. By a vote of 37-24, the Democrat-dominated Assembly voted down AB 1323. Supporters of a fracking ban held back two similar bills after realizing the Assembly would likely reject those bills, also. Anti ...

Climate models used by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and other climate groups to predict future temperatures have failed miserably at predicting climate in recent years, new data show. Scientists overseeing temperature data collected by NASA satellite instruments compared real-world temperatures in the ...

The following statement was released today by Heartland Institute President Joseph Bast: "Earlier this week, the Information Center for Global Change Studies, an Information group of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, published a Chinese edition of 'Climate Change Reconsidered,' translating and combining the contents of two volumes ...

Federal wildlife officials announced they will allow wind producers in California’s Tehachapi Mountains to kill endangered California condors without fear of prosecution. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said the free pass will apply only when wind power companies inadvertently kill or harass the large and highly endangered birds ...

School districts across the country are digging through the details to see how the Affordable Care Act, known as ObamaCare, will impact their budgets starting January 1, 2014. The law’s mandates are causing schools to fire employees, reduce employee hours, and otherwise slash education spending. “Since most of [school districts ...

A Kentucky state law that requires new moving companies to prove to government bureaucrats there is a “need” for their services before they can obtain a license has been blocked by a federal judge. On June 13, U.S. District Court Judge Danny Reeves ordered the state of Kentucky to halt enforcement of its so-called “competitor ...

President Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency has already promulgated a tsunami of 1,920 regulations, many of which will bring few health or environmental benefits but will impose high economic and unemployment costs, often to advance the administration’s decidedly anti-hydrocarbon agenda. The Heritage Foundation calculates EPA ...