The Heartland Institute

The final costs of purchases of cigarettes, firearms, poker machines, and items totaling more than $3,500 that Cook County, Illinois businesses and residents make outside the county will rise under the county’s new 2013 budget. The higher costs are the result of new and higher taxes that were first proposed by County Board ...

Next week is the election that will bring hundreds of new lawmakers into office at the state level. Looming large for states is the outcome of the presidential election. The outcome, regardless of who wins, will guide public policy at the state level for the next four years. This is especially true of health care, with ...

The City of Chicago needs $1.5 billion a year beginning in 2016 to shore up its pensions for municipal workers across police, fire, water, and other municipal departments as well as for elected officials, Mayor Rahm Emanuel has warned the city’s aldermen. Like many pension fund managers, city officials had hoped above-market ...

When he describes a fundamental truth of pension accounting universally accepted by economists, Andrew Biggs of the American Enterprise Institute achieves an elegant explanation: “A guaranteed liability must be discounted at a risk-free rate.” But that truth is ugly when it reveals the hidden tax increases and service cuts likely ...

The pension system in Illinois is broke, both literally and structurally. Funding Illinois’ pension system is becoming increasingly difficult. According to Bloomberg, the national median funding ratio for state pension systems is around 71.7 percent for the year through June 2011. Illinois has the nation’s weakest funding ratio ...

President Barack Obama’s budget plan would continue policies that have made the economic recovery since 2009 the weakest since the Great Depression, whereas those of Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) would return the federal government to its modern average level of spending and growth, says Heartland Institute Senior Fellow Peter Ferrara ...

Earlier this week the non-partisan Tax Foundation released its 2013 State Business Tax Climate index . This must-read report allows elected officials to see how their states stack up in terms of creating a tax system that is appealing to business, and thus likely to attract job-creators to the state. According to ...

Like many other states across the nation, Texas faces tough decisions about the pension benefits it provides its state employees. Although Texas has one of the better-funded state pension systems, it still faces many of the same problems other states face. Texas’s pension system is a “defined-benefit” system. These are more ...

On November 6, voters in San Antonio, Texas will vote on whether the city should own and operate a network of early childhood education centers. The initiative is controversial, and rightly so. There are many reasons to question whether such a network, which would operate in competition with existing private and public day ...

In the summer of 2011, Congress sent the President a bill that acknowledged failure. Instead of swallowing hard and coming up with trillions of dollars in deficit reductions, they punted the effort to a “Super Committee” of Republican and Democratic lawmakers from the House and Senate to figure it out. The specter of sequestration ...

The fiscal cliff threatens an unprecedented tax increase at year end. Taxes would rise by more than $500 billion in 2013—an average of almost $3,500 per household—as almost every tax cut enacted since 2001 would expire. Middle-income households would see an average increase of almost $2,000. Policymakers are rightly concerned ...

Throughout the US, the number and scope of defined-benefit pension plans have been on the wane for over a quarter century. Many private-sector workers have had their benefits wiped out by bankruptcies and fire sales of distressed businesses despite the legislative push from pay-as-you-go to fully funded pension plans. Meanwhile ...

The next time Kansas spends more than a decade and almost a third of a billion dollars to fix up the state Capitol, it will get receipts. So say the state’s top elected purse keepers, the State Finance Council, a nine-member panel that makes the state’s big financial decisions when the Legislature is not in session. The ...

The following is an excerpt from a speech Heartland Institute President Joseph Bast delivered at the "Yes, We Did Build It" rally in Waukesha, WI on September 22, 2012 : Back in July, President Obama said, If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life ...

By selecting House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) as his running mate, Republican candidate Mitt Romney reframed the 2012 presidential election as a contest between Ryan’s 2013 proposed budget, which was adopted by the entire Republican House, and President Barack Obama’s 2013 proposed budget, which can be taken as ...

The relatively low-tax and limited-regulation policies adopted by the state of Texas have provided it with many economic and commercial advantages over other states, but policymakers and elected officials must be careful not to overlook potential problems in those areas where the state has failed to restrain the size and scope ...

On August 9, The Heartland Institute hosted its eighth Emerging Issues Forum , a gathering of state elected officials, public policy experts, and Heartland senior staff to discuss the issues likely to be on the agenda in 2013 and beyond. The event was a huge success, attracting more than 85 elected officials from at ...

Idaho, like most U.S. states, has struggled to keep its unemployment insurance fund solvent. The unemployment trust fund already faced insolvency once as a result of the 2008 recession. This insolvency was caused by a rapid rise in the number of unemployed citizens entering the system and a 2005 law that lowered the tax multiplier ...

The Scottsdale, Arizona, City Council has voted 7-0 to spend nearly $2 million for a new police station – and refuses to disclose where the building is located. In addition to keeping the location secret, the City Council has also kept its discussions secret. Council members made the decision to spend $1.87 million for the ...

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