If you don’t visit Freedom Pub and the Heartlander digital magazine every day, you’re missing out on some of the best news and commentary on liberty and free markets you can find. But worry not, freedom lovers! Heartland Weekly is here for you every Monday with a highlight show. Subscribe to the email today, and read this week’s edition below.
It Adds Up: Trump’s Plan to Cut Taxes Will Grow Federal Revenue
Peter Ferrara, The Observer
While Donald Trump’s and congressional Republicans’ unified tax reform plan involves some backtracking from original proposals, it is still just what is needed: a large, even historic, pro-growth tax rate cut based on the same model as the enormously successful Kennedy and Reagan tax cuts. The plan aims to reduce America’s hopelessly outdated corporate tax rates. It proposes to cut the federal corporate rate to 20 percent, leaving the total rate at close to 25 percent, counting state taxes. READ MORE
This Year’s Atlantic Hurricane Season Has Not Been Historically Unusual
Joseph D’Aleo, Townhall
The 2017 Atlantic hurricane season got an early start with Arlene in April, but the most powerful storms didn’t start to hit until the last week of August. Before they struck, the United States had experienced almost 12 years without a major hurricane making landfall, the longest such lull since the 1860s. The waxing and waning of powerful hurricane seasons is not new. Major hurricanes have occurred throughout history, even during cold periods, and there is no evident trend toward more or more powerful hurricanes in the modern record. READ MORE
Nobel Board Foolishly Awards Micromanaging Fake ‘Libertarian’ Its Economics Prize
Joseph Bast, The Federalist
On Monday, the Norwegian socialists who decide who gets the Nobel Prize in economics chose another proponent of “behavioral economics,” the University of Chicago’s Richard Thaler. It was a poor choice. Thaler might be very smart and even clever, but his contribution to economics was largely, as he put it himself, to “make a career stealing ideas from psychologists.” READ MORE
Featured Podcast: Yaron Brook, Ayn Rand Institute: The Moral Case for Finance
Bernie Sanders says bankers are bad, but money makes our dreams into reality. Research fellow Jesse Hathaway and Ayn Rand Institute Executive Chairman Yaron Brook talk about the morality of moneymaking, and Brook’s new book, In Pursuit of Wealth: The Moral Case for Finance. Brook debunks the common wisdom about finance, explaining how the financial industry is actually moral and virtuous. He flips the script and explains explains how banking and investing is all about making people’s lives better. LISTEN TO MORE
America First Energy Conference
President Trump has already turned back years of Obama’s anti-energy policies, allowing the United States to once again emerge as a global energy leader. This is an amazing turn of events, one that would have been impossible had Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election. To discuss this remarkable moment in history, The Heartland Institute is gathering the country’s best energy policy experts, as well as key players in the industry, for the America First Energy Conference at the J.W. Marriott Galleria Hotel in Houston, Texas on Thursday, November 9, 2017. Join Heartland for an event that will explain what has happened, and more importantly, what comes next. REGISTER NOW
A Viewer’s Guide to Natgeo’s ‘From the Ashes’: Why it Belongs in the Ashes
James H. Rust and Edward Hudgins
The recently released National Geographic documentary film titled From the Ashes does a great job burning away the credibility of the channel’s esteemed brand. This Heartland Policy Brief shows how National Geographic has deviated from the path of producing interesting and science-based documentaries, and instead joined the ranks of advocates, special-interest groups, and alarmists offering a distorted and inaccurate vision of the role of fossil fuels in human civilization. It ignored and hid all facts that run contrary to its narrative. It chose storytelling over truth-telling. READ MORE
School Reform News – House, Senate Split on Trump’s Proposed Education Reforms
The November 2017 edition of School Reform News is available online in PDF format. Read about how the U.S. Congress is thwarting President Trump’s plans to make necessary budget cuts to the Department of Education. This edition also has stories Illinois’ new tax-credit scholarship program, efforts to protect free-speech rights on college campuses in Ohio, a Texas district instituting “family nights” with no homework, and more. READ MORE
Good Riddance to Bad Clean Power Plan
H. Sterling Burnett, Climate Change Weekly
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) filed a notice in the Federal Register it is rescinding former President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan (CPP)—providing more proof gridlock in the congressional swamp is not slowing President Donald Trump’s efforts to roll back ineffective and extremely costly climate programs. EPA’s decision was not unexpected. Trump has repeatedly said the United States faces numerous problems more important than climate change. READ MORE
Rights for a River? An Effort to Undermine Democracy
Rob Natelson, Colorado Springs Gazette
An environmental organization is asking a court to grant a river status as a “person” with the rights of personhood, thereby launching an attack on judicial fairness, the rule of law, and democracy. The group is Deep Green Resistance, and it argues the Colorado River should have rights. On what reasonable basis Deep Green thinks its knows better than others what the river needs is anyone’s guess. How a judge would know better what the river needs than local users, lawmakers, and residents is another mystery. READ MORE
Featured Podcast: J.T. Williams: EPA Threatens Galveston Bay with Toxic Waste Disaster
J.T. Williams, executive director of the Galveston Maritime Business Association describes a dangerous situation in Texas. Against the advice the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers and the Texas Commission of Environmental Quality – as well as the wishes of the businesses and property owners in the region, holdovers from the Obama administration EPA Region 6 are threatening to pursue a dredging operation at a Superfund site in Texas that is likely to pollute the San Jacinto River and Galveston Bay. LISTEN TO MORE
Lowering Hepatitis C Treatment Prices
Thomas Hemphill, RealClearHealth
American consumers have been inundated over the past few years by marketing campaigns for a growing range of anti-viral, biologic “cures” for Hepatitis C, which affects between 2.7 million and 3.9 million Americans and is the major cause of death from liver cancer and cirrhosis for 1 to 5 percent of people who contract the disease. The treatments are expensive, but the costs are coming down and better treatments with lower prices are soon to come. READ MORE
A New ‘Grand Bargain’ For Americans To Reduce U.S. Debt
John Merrifield and Barry Poulson, Investor’s Business Daily
Brinkmanship over federal budgets has motivated citizens to address the debt crisis by attempting to enact a balanced-budget amendment to the U.S. Constitution. After waiting decades for Congress to pass a balanced-budget amendment, citizens are close to enacting the amendment through an Article V amendment convention. READ MORE
Talk With Heartland Experts!
You are cordially invited to participate in an exclusive monthly conference call for supporters who give $250 or more to The Heartland Institute. The first Wednesday of each month we will host a 20- to 30-minute call with a short presentation by one or more of Heartland’s senior staff.
Please RSVP to Gwendalyn Carver at 312/377-4000 or [email protected]. You will receive dial-in information upon confirmation of your participation. DONATE HERE
Help Us Stop Wikipedia’s Lies!
Have you visited Heartland’s Wikipedia page recently? The good news is that it is more complete than it was just a couple months ago, after leftists took it over and trashed it. Most of the new information is accurate and unbiased. But the lies and libel about our positions on smoking and climate change remain. Other conservative and free-market sites suffer, too. Wikipedia refuses to make many of the changes we request and deletes and reverses the changes made by others. We need your help! READ MORE
Jim Lakely is the Vice President and Director of Communications of The Heartland Institute.
