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John Nothdurft and Donny Kendal present episode #99 of the In The Tank Podcast. Today’s podcast features work from the Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy, the Goldwater Institute, and American Legislative Exchange Council.

As they don caps and gowns, endure commencement speeches and take their diplomas, many high school and college graduates face bleak prospects in an economy that grew a dismal 0.5% the first quarter.

John Nothdurft returns to the podcast, joining Donny Kendal for episode #29 of the In The Tank Podcast. This weekly podcast features (as always) interviews, debates, roundtable discussions, stories, and light-hearted segments on a variety of topics on the latest news. The show is available for download as part of the Heartland Daily Podcast every Friday. Today’s podcast features work from R Street, the Cascade Policy Institute, and the James Madison Institute.

The campaign is about all fossil fuels: oil, gas, and coal. Instead of an “all of the above” energy policy, when it comes to fossil fuels, they want “none of the above.” A big part of the effort is focused on preventing the extraction of fossil fuels on public lands—which is supported by presidential candidates Senator Bernie Sanders and Secretary Hillary Clinton. The recent moratorium of leasing federal lands for coal mining, announced by Secretary of Interior Sally Jewell, is considered a great victory for “keep it in the ground.”

This time of the year, whether in good economic times or bad, is when Americans gather with their families and friends and enjoy a Thanksgiving meal together. It marks a remembrance of those early Pilgrim Fathers who crossed the uncharted ocean from Europe to make a new start in Plymouth, Massachusetts. What is less appreciated is that Thanksgiving also is a celebration of the birth of free enterprise in America.

Over the last several decades, trial lawyers have found increasingly “creative” ways to use the legal system to enable themselves to cart off huge portions of legal settlements for themselves. Some of these high profile abuses made headline news, such as the class action exploitations of the 1990s. But actually being required to take a case to court does come with expense, and wanting to enhance their riches trial lawyers have found some new legal system weaknesses to exploit for less out of pocket expense.

Arguably the single most successful endeavor undertaken by Congress in the past 20 years was its effort to enact significant reform of the U.S. welfare system. Even greater success is possible, with simple steps that states can take to help millions of impoverished people transition from government dependency to the freedom and self-sufficiency provided by a high-quality job.

Important attention has been drawn to the shameful condition of middle income housing affordability in California. The state that had earlier earned its own “California Dream” label now limits the dream of homeownership principally to people either fortunate enough to have purchased their homes years ago and to the more affluent. Many middle income residents may have to face the choice of renting permanently or moving away.

In the Hunger Games franchise of movies and young-adult novels, political power is concentrated within the Capitol; citizens there revel in pageantry and pomp while their fellow Americans suffer from the dire, impoverishing consequences of the government’s policies. That same sort of sedimentation of power and money into the nation’s capital is happening in the current-day United States.

Behavioral psychologists and economists have considered incentives to be a normal part of human nature for decades, if not centuries, but applying them to education still stokes controversy. For example, some people recoil at the idea of paying kids and their teachers for high scores on Advanced Placement tests that get students college credit in high school, as some schools in Northern Virginia are doing,

President Obama seems committed to forcing the minimum wage up through federal intervention. If he succeeds, it will only damage the economy further, resulting in higher unemployment and less growth. Here are four reasons a minimum wage is a bad idea.

This [book] is not some journalist’s amusing observations on life in Washington, D.C. or a dumbed-down introduction to the Constitution. This one makes you think on every page!