Jay Evensen - Opinions

Forget Trump; why not make all our tax returns public?

4/10/2019

Forget about Donald Trump’s tax returns. I want to know how much my neighbors paid in taxes.

Scratch that. I have wonderful neighbors, most of whom have lived on my street longer than the 27 years my wife and I have been there.

It’s the people a few blocks away I wonder about. How much do they earn last year and what did they pay?

Has ranked choice voting's day arrived in Utah?

4/9/2019

When it comes to the way people vote in Utah, change is hard.

Hard, but not impossible.

In the next few days, we will just how many cracks and fissures are developing in the stone-encrusted, traditional way of doing things, where every candidate on the ballot competes to see who gets the most votes outright.

NYC-style congestion tolls are what Utah needs

4/3/2019

A few years ago, while on an ambitious coast-to-coast baseball road trip with my oldest son, I drove through New York City.

I don’t mean I drove by it on major highways. I navigated through Manhattan and Brooklyn in search of old stadium sites. If you look closely, you can find vestiges of the old Polo Grounds and plaques where Ebbets Field and even Hilltop Park, first home of the Yankees (then called the Highlanders) once stood.

Things to think about as tax month begins

4/2/2019

A recent study found that Utah is the nation’s second least stressed state. I would have read the whole thing, but I was too busy and too worried about a million different things to take the time.

Sort of makes you wonder what life is like in the other 48 states, doesn’t it? Or perhaps you wonder what life is like in Minnesota, that frozen Shangri-la the survey said was less stressful than here.

Because April has poked its head into our lives like some struggling crocus fighting brown earth and a late-season snow, your major stressor right now may be taxes. If so, it’s worth pondering that politicians should be glad tax day, whether by design or otherwise, comes in the middle of April and not near Election Day in November. Not a lot of incumbents would be re-elected if people had to drop off their ballots and tax returns at the Post Office simultaneously.

'Turkey lady' taught the world how to forgive

3/27/2019

Victoria Ruvolo’s professional website announced her death Wednesday with a simple admonition. “Forgive someone today.”

That is a fitting epitaph for one of the greatest people I have met — someone who didn’t just decide to turn metaphorical lemons into lemonade, but who used that lemonade to refresh the world.

Actually, she would be perturbed at me for calling her Victoria. That was what her mother called her when she was angry, she told me once after I had used the name in a column. To her friends, she was Vickie.

Supreme court gerrymander case could affect Utah

3/26/2019

Democrats in the Utah Senate may be the last to know, but when I asked them during an editorial board visit this week whether any legislative attempts are underway to change Utah’s anti-gerrymandering initiative, they said no; at least not that they had heard.

That, of course, is not expected to be the case forever. It’s just that Utah’s Republican lawmakers have until 2021 to make changes to what voters approved. That is the year when 2020 Census figures are available and the state will need to readjust its political boundaries.

In case you didn’t notice, lawmakers had their hands full changing the other two successful initiatives during this year’s session. Given how readily they did that, it’s hard to believe they would leave this one alone.

How one man's death brought out the worst in people

3/20/2019

In the age of irony, Jeremiah Disney’s death presented itself like a grapefruit tossed to a home run hitter.

But those taking swings at it have been — again, ironically — saying more about themselves than about the tragic and short life of an apparently misguided young man.

According to various news reports from Marion, Indiana, a small town in the north central part of the state, a man noticed someone had been rummaging through his cluttered garage one day about a week ago. He decided the next day to clean things up and see what was missing.

Should Utah's Legislature spend longer in session?

3/19/2019

Here’s a trivia question: How many bills did the Utah Legislature pass in the 45-day annual session that ended last week?

If you said 574, you’re an astute observer.

Now, can you think of 574 things the state had a burning need to put in its code books? Can you think of 100?

The sales tax monster that just won't die

3/15/2019

If state lawmakers need easy money, you can be sure the conversation will come around to putting the full state sales tax rate back on food purchases.

No one seems to have invented a wooden stake effective enough to put a final end to that monster. No one seems to have an antidote to whatever potion some lawmakers took years ago that makes them see this tax as the shiny answer to their problems.

Daylight savings' hour may finally have come

3/13/2019

Politics is not without ironies. A resolution to urge Congress to let states keep daylight saving time year-round nearly ran out of time on the final day for committee hearings at the Utah Legislature.

By the time the sponsor, Rep. Marsha Judkins, R-Provo, began her presentation, only seven minutes remained in the meeting.

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