The Heartland Institute

San Francisco Board of Supervisors President David Chiu has introduced legislation that would require building owners who are required to have water drinking fountains to provide bottled water refill stations as well. Reducing Use of Plastic The legislation offered June 26 is designed to enable people to keep using, or recycling ...

Few taxes imposed by state and local governments are more controversial than the estate tax, popularly referred to as the “death tax.” Estate taxes are levies on property transferred from a deceased person’s estate to relatives or other parties. The estate tax rate is scheduled to automatically increase, and the amount excluded ...

According to a report by the Texas Transportation Institute, the cost of urban traffic congestion, converted to a dollar value, quintupled between 1982 and 2007. Although congestion costs have fallen recently due to the recession and decreased economic activity, the cost of urban congestion remains more than $100 billion a year ...

With the nation’s economy still in the doldrums, unemployment compensation funds in many states have become insolvent. One reason is that waste and fraud plague the system. In some states nearly 20 percent of all benefit payments result from error or fraud, according to the National Center for Policy Analysis. A July 2012 ...

A judge recently ruled that a Parent Trigger petition from parents in Adelanto, California is valid and their request to convert their children’s school to a charter must go into effect. California is the first state to pass a Parent Trigger law, which a dozen other states also have considered. It allows a simple majority ...

The “digital divide” is a term that has been used to characterize a gap between “information haves and have-nots,” or in other words, between those Americans who use or have access to telecommunications and information technologies and those who do not. One important subset of the digital divide debate concerns high-speed Internet ...

This primer from the New York Law School and the Advanced Communication Law and Policy Institute discuss current trends in telecom policy from state governments and the new trend away from traditional forms of communications and the new law emerging because of this. ...

A proposed solar power plant in the Mojave Desert will not have to meet the requirements of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) now that Gov. Jerry Brown (D) has signed legislation exempting the project from the law. Environmental groups argued against the exemption, saying the solar power plant would despoil the ...

Corporate Income Taxes Problem All 50 states currently have a higher combined federal and state corporate tax rate than France, whose rate is third-highest among OECD countries 1. Although corporate income taxes make up a fairly minor part of state tax revenue, they have a harmful impact on economic behavior. Nonetheless, many ...

A judge has ruled in favor of parents hoping to take over low-performing Desert Trails Elementary in Adelanto, California under the state’s Parent Trigger law. “Overall, it’s a landmark ruling,” said Gloria Romero, head of California’s Democrats for Education Reform and the law’s author. “It’s a new day in California, and it ...

In response to the subprime crisis and Great Recession central banks in advanced economies have cut interest rates towards zero and increased monetary accommodation to step-up domestic growth. In this paper I attempt to describe the unintended consequences of the low interest rate policies in emerging markets. I argue based on ...

The food stamp program is due for reauthorization as part of a new farm bill. It is the second most expensive means-tested aid program, increasing from $19.8 billon in 2000 to $84.6 billion in 2011, and President Barack Obama has proposed a budget to keep food stamp spending at sharply elevated levels for the next decade ...

What do they reveal about the nature of snowpack conditions there over the past several decades of supposedly unprecedented global warming? Contrary to the worries of climate alarmists, it would appear that there is nothing unusual, unnatural or unprecedented about the highs and lows of the Andean snowpack... Read More Biofuels ...

In states and municipalities across the country, the high cost of traditional defined-benefit public pensions has become a hot-button issue as unfunded liabilities have raced out of control. These increasing liabilities are further complicated by the fact that in many instances the regulators controlling pension funds have overestimated ...

Myth 1: A tax on Internet sales just enables states to collect taxes they are already legally entitled to collect. Fact: A state is not legally entitled to collect taxes from Internet sellers with no physical presence in that state. In Quill Corp. v. North Dakota, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1992 that a mail-order or ...

(An updated verison of this policy document can be found here ) Motor fuel taxes affect everyone who uses any kind of transportation. These taxes, which are paid as an excise duty – a tax on the sale of motor fuel – increase the cost of transportation for individuals. They are designed by most national and state governments ...

Problem States across the country continue to struggle with balancing their budgets as a result of increasing spending and a lagging economy. Many states also have accumulated massive amounts of debt that taxpayers will have to pay due to years of overspending combined with state employee pensions and benefits. Thirty-one states ...

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) provides benefits to low-income, eligible households on an electronic benefit transfer (EBT) card; benefits can then be exchanged for foods at authorized retailers. SNAP reaches a large share of low-income households. In April 2012, there were 46 million persons in 22 million ...

Four years after approving a $9 billion high-speed rail proposal, Californians strongly oppose high-speed rail and would vote against it if given another chance, a University of Southern California/ Los Angeles Times poll reports. Only 33 Percent Support In the 2008 elections, Californians approved borrowing $9 billion for high-speed ...

Two prominent environmental activist groups, the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council, are rallying against California Gov. Jerry Brown’s efforts to fast-track construction of high-speed rail in the state. Special Environmental Exemptions Brown is asking the state legislature to give high-speed rail special exemptions ...