Jay Evensen - Opinions

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.

Let's spend whatever it takes to do the new prison right

6/19/2019

The last thing the state needs is to dedicate its new prison next year and immediately declare a prison crisis.

After hundreds of millions of dollars and acrimonious debates over whether the state needed to replace the Draper facility and where the new one should go, politicians would only add to public distrust and anger if they cut the ribbon and then scrambled for ways to find more beds to house a prison population that doesn’t fit what they built.

Harvard's rejection of Parkland survivor shows how hard it is to survive teenage stupidity today

6/18/2019

When I was a mere lad of 13, I went on a trip with my junior high jazz band to California. We spent a day at Disneyland. I remember being mildly irritated as I sat in the bus late that night, long after the park had closed, waiting for some of our band members to return so we could go to the hotel.

Turns out they had been arrested for shoplifting and were detained by park police until their parents could be notified and certain arrangements made.

Airport security: Can we ever get it right?

6/12/2019

After dropping my wife and one of our sons at the airport Wednesday for a trip to see relatives, watching from afar as they went through the familiar TSA dance, I was struck by the concept of faith.

At airports, people line up the way I remember my classmates lining up for vaccinations in elementary school back in the ‘60s, with grim-faced resignation and a vague hope that the pain the school nurse was inflicting somehow would be worth the collective good it would cause.

Is Utah soft compared to hard-working states?

6/11/2019

I confess, I’m eating lunch at my desk as I write this.

That makes me very American, but not so much a Utahn, apparently.

Wallethub came out with a ranking this week of the best states in which to live. Utah finished ninth, which is a good thing. But one of the reasons Utah scored so high is that it finished first as the state with the lowest hours worked per week.

That’s right. No matter how hard you think you’re working, people in other states are working harder.

The internet and its snap judgments

6/5/2019

The internet giveth, and the internet taketh away.

What it gives can, at times, be an instant sense of justice.

A few days ago, the world was shown a smartphone video of a manager at a Salt Lake fast food restaurant angrily telling a worker she had been fired. The son of the worker, an Hispanic woman with limited English skills, said he was trying to help his mother ask for a promised raise — one she was too shy to ask for herself.

Would 'microtransit' get you out of your car and on a train?

6/4/2019

Would you ride mass transit if someone out there offered you a cheap way to get from your neighborhood to the nearest station or bus stop? Is that what’s stopping you?

And if that someone was a tax-subsidized van you could summon with a smartphone app, would that be fair to the private companies that are trying to help you get there right now but that have to charge a higher price to stay in business?

Security breaches: Just how vulnerable are we?

5/29/2019

Internet security is kind of like your sewage system. You hardly think about it until something goes wrong, and then you can’t think of much else.

But it’s more important than that, of course. Unless you have a smart toilet (it’s a thing; look it up), your bathroom may be one of the few places left untouched by the internet.

Would you vote to do away with the income tax?

5/28/2019

With spring rains apparently beginning to dissipate, and with summer beaming on the horizon, it’s time to lie in the grass and ponder some recent developments.

Be bold: Utah lawmakers are hinting they want to consider “big, bold ideas” when it comes to tax reform. These, according to Senate Majority Whip Dan Hemmert, might even include the “crazy idea” of drop-kicking the income tax entirely. That would put Utah on a par with neighboring Nevada and Wyoming.

That’s bold, all right. The million-dollar (or much more, actually) question, is whether you, the average Utahn, would vote to make this happen.

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