funding

As Americans hit the road during summer driving season, one thing that’s probably not on their minds is how the maintenance of those roads gets funded.

John and Donny continue their exploration of think tanks in episode #44 of the In The Tank Podcast. This weekly podcast features (as always) interviews, debates, and roundtable discussions that explore the work of think tanks across the country. The show is available for download as part of the Heartland Daily Podcast every Friday. Today’s podcast features work from the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Empire Center for Public Policy, the Manhattan Institute, and the Texas Public Policy Foundation.

Losing the climate science battle, climate alarmists want government to silence skeptics. They haven’t employed the thumb screws, rack or auto-da-fe that churches and states once used to interrogate, silence and eliminate heretics and witches. However, global warming alarmists are well practiced in the modern equivalents, to protect their $1.5-trillion Climate Crisis Industry.

Being Leftist means never having to say you’re sorry. Being a huge Barack Obama-Democrat donor doesn’t hurt either. Being incredibly generous in support of Leftism also allows you to enact incredibly anti-free market, anti-Reality policies that are a huge boon to you – at the exorbitant expense of the private sector players who made your successes possible.

With many cities and states struggling to balance their budgets and financially strained taxpayers unable to sustain liberal spending sprees, elected officials are being compelled to choose between raising taxes and service fees or cutting back on the quality and quantity of services provided.

In today’s edition of The Heartland Daily Podcast, Heather Kays, managing editor of School Reform News speaks with Rebecca Sibilia. Sibilia is founder and CEO of EdBuild, a New Jersey based organization which aims to address problems with education funding across the country. Kays and Sibilia discuss funding inequities in public education.

Congressman Grijalva and Senators Markey, Boxer and Whitehouse sent letters to universities, think tanks and companies, demanding detailed information on skeptics’ funding and activities – in an attempt to destroy their funding, reputations and careers, while advancing “crony climate alarm science.”

Marching under the banner of “transparency,” there is a growing movement in the U.S. to limit truly free speech. The movement claims to be attacking “dark money,” but the reality is that its adherents want to shut up its ideological opponents. Independent expressions of support or opposition for candidates or political issues are marginalized by irrelevant questions about funding sources. Honest research and well-formulated arguments are denounced as “biased” or “untrustworthy” because of who the donors are rather than based on the merits of the arguments presented.

Democrats’ attempts to paralyze climate skeptics in academia, think tanks, and companies, using intimidating letters threatening a federal investigation into their funding connections, backfired. They opened a Pandora’s Box of questions concerning where climate alarmists get their money. Now Democrat Senators Barbara Boxer (CA), Ed Markey (MA), and Sheldon Whitehouse (RI) and Democrat Arizona Rep. Raul Grijalva have egg on their faces.

There has been no measurable global warming for 18 years. The majority of polar bear populations are stable or growing; hurricane landfalls have been virtually nonexistent in the United States for a decade; cold temperature and snowfall records are being set daily (more than 2,600 cold temperature records were set or broken between February 19 and February 25 of this year alone); Antarctica is setting sea ice records in the middle of its summer; and in the Arctic, the much ballyhooed sea ice decline of the late 1990 and early 2000s has recovered over the past two years.

Panel 8 of the 9th International Conference on Climate Change was on the subject of “Costs and Benefits of Renewable Energy.” The panel was focused on the subject of renewable energy, specifically the high cost and potentially devastating economic consequences produced by the federal government’s efforts to replace the current energy sources with renewables.

The benefits of government-funded university research are not shared widely enough in society, with universities retaining full ownership, for the most part, of their academic work. This means they get to profit from the government-funded research, and rarely have to share it with the taxpayers. By mandating that the research it spends so much taxpayer money on enter the public sphere, the government can more effectively spread the benefits of its own largesse and do its duty to all its citizens to provide them with the full benefit of what it produces with their tax money.

Politicians and the media have retrained their sights on the Koch brothers’ political influence, but a look at some numbers suggests they should investigate other billionaires—such as Bill Gates. The New York…