The Heartland Institute

Environmentalists have filed a challenge to the U.S. Forest Service’s approval of a wind turbine project slated for Green Mountain National Forest in Vermont. First in National Forest System “On January 3 of this year, after eight years of study, the forest supervisor of the Green Mountain National Forest made a decision to ...

As states have been debating whether to implement a health insurance exchange, a key deterrent has been that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services had released only draft rules. HHS now has released final insurance exchange rules, and many states are left with questions unanswered or suspicions confirmed. According ...

School choice programs don’t threaten public school budgets, according to a new study by the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice. A popular argument against school choice programs is allowing children to leave public schools leaves the school with fewer resources to pay fixed costs, notes study author Benjamin Scafidi ...

Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake has proposed raising the city’s 2 cent tax on beverage containers to 5 cents. She said during a recent City Council meeting the proposal is part of her Better Schools Initiative to build new schools. “We have identified three new funding streams, including the bottle tax, that will begin ...

Fannie Mae plans to sell nearly 2,500 foreclosed real estate properties to institutional investors who promise to rent them out for several years rather than resell them. The goal is to rapidly reduce the backlog of houses for sale without crashing real estate prices. This pilot project is scheduled to launch in May. It would ...

Catastrophe bonds are insurance-linked securities that offset major costs to taxpayers and insurers caused by natural disasters such as hurricanes and earthquakes. Cat bonds, as they are known, work differently from other types of bonds. Investors lose their entire principal in the event of a catastrophe that meets the terms ...

Talmedge Heflin of the Texas Public Policy Foundation explains why a coalition of public policy groups has come together to recommend ways Texas legislators can cut billions of dollars of spending while keeping the state economically strong. Many of the recommendations could be applied in other states as well. ...

The Minnesota Public Utilities Commission (PUC) has voted against a proposed wind farm in rural Goodhue County because the developers failed to provide an acceptable plan to protect bald eagles and other species. Eagles, Migratory Birds Threatened Goodhue Wind proposed the construction of a 32,700 acre, 48-turbine wind farm in ...

If President Obama and Congress fail to act this year, an enormous, unprecedented tax increase will fall on American taxpayers starting on January 1, 2013. The Washington Post called the looming tax increase “Taxmageddon,” and Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke called it a “massive fiscal cliff.” This impending tax increase ...

President Obama’s health care law is likely to significantly increase demand for primary care physicians even as the nation already faces shortages of doctors in this field. According to Kathryn Nix, a health care policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, decades of overregulation of the health care labor market coupled with ...

Seven states banded together in a lawsuit to block President Obama’s controversial preventive medicine policy which mandates all employers and institutions who provide insurance to their employees and students must supply contraceptives, abortifacients, and sterilization services without co-pays. The attorneys general of Florida, Michigan ...

Shell Oil Company is partnering with the Nature Conservancy of Texas in an effort to rebuild an eroding island which is home to more than 24,000 nesting birds. Shell has donated $500,000 toward the first phase of the project, which is estimated to cost a total of $2.3 million. Winter storms that moved across Corpus Christi ...

Detroit spends millions of dollars more each month than it receives in revenues and faces a challenge to continue providing the most basic of government services—police, fire, trash collection, even street lighting. The city narrowly averted a state takeover because of the city's financial woes. The City Council voted 5-4 April ...

A pair of school choice initiatives backed by Maine’s governor has received a cold legislative reception, including the demise of a proposal to open the state’s publicly funded tuition program to religious schools. Two of four education bills supported this year by Gov. Paul LePage (R) would expand Maine parents’ power to select ...

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is underestimating the costs of numerical nutrient restrictions it is imposing on Florida waters, the National Research Council (NRC) reports. The NRC, which is an arm of the National Academies, concluded in a March 6 report EPA is relying on overly optimistic assumptions about compliance ...

European Union regulations are impeding network investments by large telecom operators, according to an industry survey released in March. The frustration over burdensome regulations is prompting investor groups to call for reducing government controls on areas such as copper pricing, the report states. The London Financial Times ...

Tax Freedom Day® 2012 arrives on April 17 this year, four days later than last year due to higher federal income and corporate tax collections. That means Americans will work 107 days into the year, from January 1 to April 17, to earn enough money to pay this year’s combined 29.2 percent federal, state, and local tax bill ...

Construction of BrightSource Energy’s Ivanpah solar power project in the Mojave Desert is destroying the habitat of threatened desert tortoises. Conservationists have documented that in addition to destroying desert tortoise habitat, the project, approximately 50 miles south of Las Vegas in southeastern California, has directly caused ...

This section of Reason Foundation's Annual Privatization Report 2011 provides a comprehensive overview of the latest on school choice, charter schools, voucher and tax credit programs, and other news from the education sector. Topics include: In 2011 15 states offered a total of 26 school voucher and tax credit programs with ...

Friends of The Heartland Institute from across America salute the organization on its 25th anniversary in 2009. Among those giving tribute to the free-market, libertarian think tank are Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch of Reason, Ed Feulner of the Heritage Foundation, Ed Crane of the Cato Institute, ATR's Grover Norquist, Sen. Jim ...