About The Heartland Institute

The Center on Taxes and the Economy is a project of The Heartland Institute, a national nonprofit research and education organization founded in 1984. Heartland’s mission is to discover, develop, and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems. Among the many free-market “think tanks” in the United States, three things make The Heartland Institute unique:

1. Our primary audiences are the nation’s 8,300 state and national elected officials and approximately 8,400 local government officials. Heartland is the only free-market organization that sends publications regularly to every national, state, and most local elected officials in the nation.

2. We produce five monthly public policy newspapers featuring news and commentary on school reform, environmental regulation, health care reform, budget and tax issues, and telecommunications regulation. Our choice of publication format has resulted in 85 percent of state legislators and 65 percent of municipal officials (according to a January 2009 telephone survey) reporting that they read at least one Heartland publication. Nearly half of state elected officials say a Heartland publication influenced their opinions or led to a change in public policy.

3. We effectively market the work of other think tanks and advocacy groups by featuring their writers and spokespersons in our publications and new releases, as speakers at our events, and in our speakers bureau, and by including their publications in PolicyBot, a database and search engine located on Heartland’s Web site. The Heartland Institute does more to promote the work of other free-market think tanks than any other think tank in the U.S. It is part of our mission to do this.

The Heartland Institute is also outside the beltway, founded and operating continuously in Chicago since 1984. We actively oppose junk science and the use of scare tactics in the areas of environmental protection and public health. And we help governments lower taxes and spending by exploring opportunities to privatize services that are delivered poorly by government bureaucracies and impose constitutional tax and spending limits on state governments.

More than one hundred academics and professional economists participate in Heartland’s research and peer review activities, and some 150 elected officials are members of Heartland’s Legislative Forum, an advisory board that helps monitor legislative trends and promotes Heartland publications to elected officials. Heartland’s 14-member Board of Directors is chaired by Dr. Herbert Walberg, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and research professor emeritus of psychology and education at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Besides its monthly public policy newspapers, Heartland publishes books, policy studies, booklets, and other publications. It operates nine Web sites which together recorded more than 13 million page views and 4.8 million visitors in 2008. It hosts dozens of events each year attracting a total of some 2,000 guests.

Heartland’s 2009 annual budget is $5.9 million. It has a full-time staff of 35 (including managing editors and senior fellows). Funds come from approximately 1,700 individuals, corporations, and foundations. No corporate donor contributes more than 5 percent of Heartland’s annual budget.