Jay Evensen - Opinions

Get ready for global depopulation

10/11/2024

When the world starts spinning into its first era of depopulation since the bubonic plague, the United States could be in a unique position to thrive and remain a dominant power.
Nicholas Eberstadt was hardly being radical when expressed the first part of that (paraphrased) thought in the November/December issue of Foreign Affairs. The Henry Wendt Chair in political economy at the American Enterprise Institute, he understands what demographers and social scientists worldwide now see as inevitable — every corner of the world except Sub-Saharan Africa is now, or soon will be, losing population.

Utah voters and their ghost amendments

10/11/2024

Four potential changes to the Utah constitution will appear on your ballot when it comes in the mail next week, but don’t believe your eyes. It’s a Halloween trick. Two of them really aren’t there.
Thanks to separate rulings in state courts, you can vote for or against them to your heart’s content, but it won’t count. They are mere words on paper.

It may be fair to call this the year of ghost amendments in Utah elections.
Amendment D, which would have allowed lawmakers to change, amend or void any citizen initiative voters had approved, was stricken because legislative leaders wrote a misleading description of it on the ballot, and because they failed to publish notice of the amendment two months before the election in newspapers statewide.
Amendment A, which would have removed the roughly eight-decades-old earmark that gave all Utah income tax collections to public and higher education (and a few social programs), met the same fate this week because it, too, wasn’t properly advertised in newspapers.
The loss of two amendments, while embarrassing, isn’t necessarily an end point. These were tossed on technicalities. We may not have heard the last of either one.
However, there is one other casualty here — the long sought-for removal of all state sales taxes on groceries — that has a less certain future. Long a pet issue for advocates of the poor and disadvantaged, it somehow found itself in an unlikely relationship with school funding.
The end of Amendment A said a yes vote meant “state statute will eliminate the state sales tax on food.” That tax rate is now 1.75%.
You may wonder what grocery sales taxes and education income taxes have in common. The simple answer is politics. Eliminating the grocery tax has, in recent years, gone from the political fringes to near the center of mainstream popularity. Five years ago, lawmakers had the temerity to pass a tax-reform measure that did the opposite — raising this tax. That, along with some other parts of the package, met with a public revolt so strong lawmakers were forced to repeal the package as one of their first acts of the 2020 general session.
Lawmakers say the food tax was not added as an incentive to get people to approve Amendment A. It was added to get the amendment through the House.
A year ago, current House Speaker Mike Schultz, R-Hooper, told the Deseret News that House members were more focused on taking the tax off food than changing how education is funded, which isn’t seen as immediately necessary.
Also, changing the income tax earmark would have freed up money to pay for removing the food tax.
Regardless, the food tax remains, having survived another near-death experience. Advocates, like the Greek mythical character Sisyphus, seem condemned to forever roll the boulder of tax relief up a steep hill, just to see it roll back again.
The tax brings in about $200 million a year, which isn’t much compared with the entire budget. The state has lost much more through recent income tax cuts in recent years.
It’s true that income taxes hurt the economy because they penalize productivity, while sales taxes apply to consumption and are, basically, voluntary — you don’t have to buy most things.
But that argument doesn’t hold for most groceries. Food is one of life’s necessities. That makes the tax regressive. The very poorest of Utahns qualify for food stamps or other programs, but those on the edge — struggling families or retirees — pay the most as a percentage of their income.
Through the years, legislative leaders have made all sorts of arguments to keep from removing that 1.75%. For a while, they even talked about raising the tax to fund programs for the poor.
So, what will be its fate?
Maybe lawmakers will save the food tax as leverage once again to get the House to pass the next version of Amendment A. Maybe they will finally pass a stand-alone bill to eliminate the tax.
Maybe, in a fit of irony, citizens will pass an initiative to do away with it, then dare lawmakers to mess with it.
Or maybe, like a never-ending Halloween, we just go on paying the 1.75% forever.

Are Americans really honest? Yes, for the most part

10/4/2024

Every time this year’s presidential hopefuls open their mouths, fact-checkers start counting the lies — or, perhaps, “mistruths” is a gentler term. It’s a necessary part of any campaign analysis, but it can distort our view of society, in general. The average person might get the impression that America is the land of dishonesty.
Don’t believe it.

End gambling on live sporting events now

9/26/2024

If, after six years, a law was discovered to be encouraging domestic violence while causing people, especially the poor, to lose what little money they could put toward savings, what would be the correct next step?
I hope you would say it would be to repeal this failed law before it did any more harm.
You would be exactly right.
Unfortunately, that’s not so easy when the subject is sports gambling, something that is making more and more money each year for sports leagues, gamblers and local governments. Spend any time watching professional sports on television and you will be bombarded by the slick and clever ads promising incentives and great returns.

How close are we to WWIII?

9/26/2024

How close is the United States to World War III?
Much closer than you might think and, unfortunately, closer than many of the nation’s leaders think, too, apparently.
We’re not ready. Not militarily, and certainly not as regular people going about our lives, immersed, as some are, in petty day-to-day concerns.
That’s the assessment of the Commission on the National Defense Strategy, a bipartisan group Congress assigned to analyze President Biden’s National Defense Strategy.

Is greed to blame for high prices, or is it government?

9/19/2024

Are American businesses greedy?
That has been the Democrat’s line ever since it became apparent that Americans blamed the Biden administration for inflation. “Greedflation” is the word invented for this purpose. Stop the greedy ones. Kamala Harris has promised to address high prices on her first day in office, if she is elected.

Gamble on election outcomes? It's a bad idea

9/16/2024

If you worry about election integrity — or, at least, about specious claims of rigged elections and the real threat of social unrest — you ought to be scared to death by what a federal judge did on Thursday.
District Judge Jia Cobb in Washington essentially legalized gambling on congressional elections.

Trump-Harris debate: why no talk about the national debt?

9/12/2024

Did you notice what was missing from the Donald Trump-Kamala Harris debate Tuesday night?
It wasn’t the consumption of household pets. Not the accusation that the other candidate is a Marxist. Not the love letters to North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong Un. Not even the promise to end all wars in a single day. All of those were covered.
No, it was the $35 trillion elephant trying to hide in the corner of the room. As my old scout master would say to the candidates, “If it had been a snake, it would have bitten you.”
And yet, the ballooning national debt, the one the Penn Wharton Budget Model last year predicted would reach unsustainable levels and crash the economy in about 20 years, sat completely ignored through the entire excruciating evening.

Where is the outrage over the murder of a hostage?

9/6/2024

If you listen only to protesters at Columbia University, you might not know that an American citizen was brutally murdered by Hamas after spending 11 months in a captivity he earned by simply attending a concert last October.
More than just being held captive, he underwent what must have been horrific pain.
A video exists, apparently, of Hersh Goldberg-Polin’s capture, right after his left arm was shattered during the merciless attack by Hamas militants on Oct. 7. The Associated Press said it shows him with “a bloodied makeshift tourniquet around his left forearm with a stump of blood and bone protruding as he was forced into a pickup truck with other young Israeli men.”
So, where’s the outrage?

Why Americans need to honor their sacred places

8/30/2024

In an interview with the University of Connecticut a few years ago, history professor and author Micki McElya talked about the importance of Arlington Cemetery as a sacred place.
“I do believe that Arlington National Cemetery – as ground that has been hallowed over time by civilian and military uses – encapsulates the entire history of the country,” she said. “It’s both profound and beautiful as a space; it doesn’t tell just one story but it tells many stories, including contested and difficult ones.”

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