The Heartland Institute

The beloved children’s story, "The Little Engine that Could," is a tale of perseverance and spunk, used to teach children that if they keep trying, they will eventually succeed. Unfortunately, sometimes we don’t. The federal government recently awarded initial funding to Illinois and Iowa for the development of passenger rail ...

There are eight urban school districts in Iowa – Cedar Rapids, Council Bluffs, Davenport, Des Moines, Dubuque, Iowa City, Sioux City, and Waterloo. Des Moines is the largest, with just under 31,000 students, and Council Bluffs is the smallest with 9,207. 1 From 2004 to 2010, the certified enrollment in all Iowa public schools ...

The use of alternative automobile parts aftermarket parts made by firms other than automobile companies or recycled parts taken from damaged vehicles or vehicles that have reached the end of their useful lives offers benefits to consumers and the environment, but the practice is not without some controversy. This paper provides ...

The Parent Trigger is an innovation in education reform recently passed into law in California. Briefly put, if half the parents whose children attend a failing public school sign a petition requesting reform of the school, the school must either shut down, become a charter school, or undergo one of two other types of reform ...

How governments regulate businesses in their jurisdictions has a major effect on economic growth. Along with taxes and government spending, regulation is one of the three principal levers policymakers can move to shape the business climate of their nation, state, or city. Most policymakers are relatively uninformed about why governments ...

In this interesting paper, Show-Me Institute researcher Audrey Spalding analyzes a topic that has received little systematic study: the compensation of school superintendents. School superintendents are the CEOs of our public school districts. Missouri school districts spend roughly $ 9,500 per student in current operating expenses ...

HARTFORD – The average Connecticut high school graduate cost taxpayers about $133,000 from kindergarten through senior year, according to new research by the Yankee Institute. For high school graduates in the city of Hartford, which has the state’s most expensive graduates, that figure climbed to just under $200,000 per graduate ...

Jeff Judson, past president of the Texas Public Policy Foundation and a senior fellow of The Heartland Institute, makes the case for free-market think tanks as the most effective drivers of public policy change. Among his reasons: "Think tanks have the complete package of skills needed to influence public opinion and the opinions ...

Across the country, credit scores play an important role in many insurance companies ratemaking. Nearly all insurers and some consumer groups say the use of credit scoring makes sense, because a wealth of research shows that people who do not manage their credit well tend to make more-expensive insurance claims. Across the country ...

Billions of dollars are being spent each year on publicly funded scientific research in the U.S. However, the Climategate scandal has brought to light glaring problems in publicly funded science including: the slowing of the advancement of science to a crawl, vast sums of money being squandered, and disturbing occurrences of ...

The financial crisis that started in the summer of 2007 in the subprime mortgage market in the U.S. and spread quickly both to other financial sectors and throughout much of the globe was the most severe such crisis since the Great Depression of the early 1930s with similar but less-severe adverse consequences for the domestic ...

Medicaid, the joint Federal-State program that was created to provide health care for the poor, celebrated its 40 th birthday in 2006. There was no party for the program. 1 In Florida and around the nation, Medicaid is growing at a long-term, unsustainable rate and threatens both state and federal budgets. It represented 2 ...

The numbers speak for themselves. After Hurricanes Katrina and Rita devastated Louisiana in 2005, more than $15 billion in private-sector insurance money flowed in to rebuild the state and its neighbors.1 In all, 933,000 dwellings, more than 75 percent of the state s total, sustained damage serious enough to make an insurance ...

"Actually, the national budget now governs the economy. Unfortunately, it is becoming more and more abnormal. For years we have been spending far beyond our means," noted General Douglas MacArthur in his retirement as Chairman of the Sperry Rand Corporation. 1 Although General MacArthur was speaking in the late 1950s, his truism ...

Charter public schools have existed in Massachusetts since 1995, after enabling legislation was included in the landmark Massachusetts Education Reform Act (MERA) of 1993. Originally conceived as laboratories for educational innovation 1 that could offer choice for families and competition for traditional district schools, charters ...

Louisiana's Commission on Streamlining Government has recommended phasing out the Louisiana Citizens Property Insurance Corporation. The proposal--still in its embryonic stages--would recreate the Joint Underwriting Association (JUA) structure that existed before 2003. To do this, the commission has recommended removing Citizens from ...

A legislative initiative called Fair, Affordable Insurance Rates (FAIR) is poised to begin gathering signatures throughout Michigan. Eli Lehrer, a senior fellow of The Heartland Institute and director of its Center on Risk, Regulation, and Markets, has written a brief Web Memo aimed at educating citizens and policymakers about ...

Executive Summary In April 2007, Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle signed Executive Order 191 establishing the Governor’s Task Force on Global Warming (GTF). The Task Force brings together members of the business, industry, government and environmental consulting communities to create a plan of action for the state of Wisconsin that addresses ...

Health care now comprises about one-sixth of the U.S. economy. Given the aging of the population, that portion is likely to grow. Therefore, making major changes in the system that delivers and funds health care requires especially careful analysis, not a rush to judgment. True, this issue has been discussed for decades, especially ...

(June 5, 2009) The most frequent question we hear is: 'When will the recession end?' 1 Last May 2 we announced the U.S. economy entered recession in January 2008. Our forecast missed by one month. The National Bureau of Economic Research declared Dec. 1, 2008, that economic activity peaked in December ...