Jay Evensen - Opinions

The ironies of number neighbors on the Internet

8/14/2019

The text came in the middle of a busy day, while I was in mid-sentence of an editorial.

“Hey,” the person I don’t know said, “You’re my number neighbor.”

I glanced at the number atop the text. Sure enough, it was identical to mine except that the last digit was one number lower.

“It appears so,” I answered after a few moments of hesitation.

The return came swiftly. “What’s up?”

Tax reform in Utah needs a bumper sticker explanation

8/13/2019

Summer is almost gone, and Utah lawmakers have yet to come up with a winning bumper sticker argument for why major tax reform is needed, and especially why the state should begin charging sales taxes for some services.

This could prove problematic as cool weather approaches and a tax reform task force struggles to come up with something that could become law.

Vaping and anxiety, twin plagues for modern teenagers

8/7/2019

The Food and Drug Administration has some new TV ads showing street magician Julius Dein using tricks to convince teenagers not to smoke e-cigarettes. They might work, if kids watched TV.

This isn’t the early 1970s, when Washington first took cigarette ads off TV and radio. Today’s teens see ads on Youtube and impatiently wait the requisite five seconds to dismiss them. They communicate on social media and, like so many of the adults around them, don’t pay much attention to news stories.

Fighting mass shootings should be today's Moonshot

8/6/2019

Mass shootings make up a small portion of the total gun deaths in the United States each year. In 2016, 71 people died in one, compared with 14,415 in other firearm-related murders, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Mother Jones.

But these statistics and comparisons mean little to the nation’s psyche, which is reeling from a feeling of terror and helplessness.

What swarms of grasshoppers can teach us about faith

7/31/2019

A few days ago, I found myself pulling into a motel in Battle Mountain, Nevada late at night, part of an impromptu trip to rescue a relative whose car had broken down during a long journey.

From inside the car, I could hear the snap, snap, snap of blue bug lights hung around the motel’s perimeter, a rapid-fire sound I first mistook for small firecrackers. These weren’t the ordinary bugs of a sultry summer night. They were grasshoppers — thousands of them. They swarmed around the entrance to my room, hopping in front of me as I tried to maneuver inside.

On Medicaid expansion, let people have what they wanted

7/30/2019

I wish I had counted the times Republican lawmakers assured everyone last winter that people in Washington said Utah likely would get a waiver to make a partial expansion of Medicaid work.

Vote for SB96, they said. We’re pretty sure everything will be OK.

"I will just emphasize that it is highly unlikely that we need to be concerned about this," the Deseret News quoted House Speaker Brad Wilson saying in February.

Internet voting and term limits - two bad ideas are back

7/25/2019

The dog days of summer may be a good time to float questionable political ideas. It beats watching watch members of Congress bloviating at hearings — a little, anyway.

Two such ideas have surfaced in recent days.

The first is online voting, announced Tuesday as a pilot project in Utah County for active-duty military members serving overseas, presumably with smartphones in their pockets or a strong desire to cast ballots while in pajamas.

The second is a new refrain on term limits, an idea that has persisted through more than a generation of failed attempts in Utah.

What about fireworks during July in Utah makes sense?

7/23/2019

As of Tuesday morning, firefighters had the upper hand battling a blaze in Emigration Canyon that, for a while, forced some evacuations. While that was going on, 23 people were displaced in Layton because of a fire that reportedly started in the kitchen.

In Draper, a house fire killed a woman and injured a small child. The cause had yet to be determined as of Tuesday.

Meanwhile, temperatures seem stuck in the 90 to 100 degree range. The Federal Emergency Management Agency this week issued heat advisories for much of the Wasatch Front.

It’s dangerously hot, which isn’t unusual for this time of year.

Think Sweden is a good example of socialized health care?

7/17/2019

I was watching the evening news two weeks ago with my wife’s 86-year-old uncle when he suddenly began having seizures.

I’m not normally prone to panic, but this was no normal medical crisis for me. My wife’s uncle, his television and his living room all reside in Sweden, in a town called Eskilstuna, population 67,359, according to 2015 figures. I was there on vacation with my family.

I was about to come face-to-face with Sweden’s vaunted health care system. To my surprise, it was not a pleasant experience.

One thing the two fringe candidates for mayor go right

7/16/2019

Among the eight candidates for Salt Lake City mayor who vied for attention at Monday’s KSL-televised debate, two stood out. Rainer Huck, a retired engineer, and Richard Goldberger, a freelance journalist, were clearly on the fringe.

They looked unserious. All the rest were dressed in their best professional clothing. But Goldberger wore an FDNY T-shirt. Huck was in a blue pullover, which he kept untucked. Few people give either much chance. They don’t have a lot of campaign money. They cast themselves as political outsiders, which means they’re outside the mainstream political structures — candidates whose ideas tend to get marginalized.

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