By definition, a ballot initiative is a challenge to the power of elected officials. But it also challenges people who might benefit from those decisions.

If SB66 makes it into law, local governments will be a little more insulated from that unpleasantness.

First, some recent history:

Two of the more publicized measures that made it onto local ballots last year were hardly liberal in nature. They were expressions of two values that define the state — religious principle and fiscal prudence.

One, in Highland, sought to overturn a City Council decision to allow retail sales on Sundays. It passed decisively.

The other, in Orem, sought to overturn a 25 percent hike in property taxes. The referendum collected enough signatures and will appear on ballots this fall. The tax hike, meanwhile, has been put on hold pending the vote.

This community muscle-flexing apparently was too much.

If SB66 becomes law, people petitioning to overthrow a newly passed local ordinance wouldn’t just have to collect a certain amount of signatures. They would have to collect them from each separate voting precinct in that community at a level matching a percentage of the number of people who voted in the most recent presidential election. The actual percentage was being amended as I wrote this.

The sponsor, Sen. Stuart Reid, R-Ogden, explained to me this is to ensure that the measure represents the feelings of a wide cross-section of the community, not just the special interest of a few.

If organizers pass that test, the local government would be required to calculate the fiscal and legal impact of the initiative and include that in the voter information pamphlet people use to make their decisions.

Highland voters, in other words, would have been given an estimate as to what their devotion to principle was costing everyone.

Likewise in Orem, although there the city is being forced to operate without its tax increase until the fall, so the costs are apparent to all.

None of this should be a surprise. SB66 is the latest in a battle that dates back more than a century.

When the populist movement began to take root at the end of the 19th century, Utah was only the second state to adopt the power of citizen initiatives and referenda. It did so in 1900 by an overwhelming vote of the people. However, it took lawmakers 16 years to pass a law that enabled initiatives, and they did so in a way that made the new right useless. People could sign petitions only in the presence of someone authorized to administer oaths, such as a judge.

In the long history since then, the state Supreme Court has forced changes that gave people more power, but the tug-of-war is never-ending.

As I’ve noted before, this isn’t an easy issue. The nation’s founders didn’t like the idea of direct democracy. The public can be manipulated by narrow interests, as Reid said. And yet initiatives are attractive ways to force the will of the people when lawmakers clearly have other interests.

The rules ought to be strict enough to keep Utah from becoming California, but loose enough to allow people to check abuses. They already are.

Supporters of SB66 can’t seem to identify a problem that needs fixing, unless it is simply that a community’s religious conviction or fiscal conservatism should not be imposed on reluctant politicians.

states, the “third coast” along the Gulf region, the Southeast manufacturing belt and the Intermountain West.

In other words, red states with business-friendly laws and policies. These areas don’t share a lot in common except low costs, strong business climates and population growth — mainly the kind that emphasizes families and children.

In fact, while the rest of the nation grew 7 percent since the turn of the century, the Intermountain West grew 20 percent, the “third coast” 14 percent, great plains more than 14 percent and the Southeast 13 percent. (Read the report by clicking here.)

In a related op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Kotkin noted that, “Raleigh, Austin, Denver and Salt Lake City have all become high-tech hubs.”

Of the Intermountain region, his report says, “Perhaps none of our corridors has better prospects than the Intermountain West region. It has the advantages of a well-educated and growing population, as well as enormous natural resources. …

“Over the past ten years, the Intermountain West has had the highest growth in jobs of any area—some 14.7 percent, more than three times the national average. … It has consistently showed the greatest growth of any region in terms of high-tech jobs.”

Kotkin sees the region’s growth prospects as remaining strong for several decades.

His conclusions are hardly startling for anyone who has watched demographic shifts and economic indicators. Utah and its metropolitan areas have been cited by a number of publications as good places to do business. What all of this means in terms of political changes and future influence is less clear.

As the report notes, “To be sure, New York, Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Chicago will remain the country's leading metropolitan agglomerations for the foreseeable future. But an important urban story of the coming decades will be the emergence of interior metropolitan areas …”

That story will be interesting to watch as it unfolds.

After some pain up front, the long term would be healthier.

An opinion piece by Tom Giovanetti, president of the Institute for Policy Innovation, lays out the case not only for celebrating the sequester, but for beginning to plan for the second round of it.

He writes that Congress and the president “have had the time and power to do a rational budget process, and they have repeatedly failed. In this country, we expect schoolchildren to know that deadlines are deadlines, and if they don’t get their homework done, to suffer the consequences. We expect you to pay your taxes on time, or you’re toast. But Congress and the president should be let off the hook for repeatedly missing legal deadlines and letting the country’s fiscal health go down the tubes? Maybe a ruling class operates that way, but not a constitutional republic.

It’s time for blunt tools, and the Great Sequester of 2013 should be considered a model, not an apocalypse.”

After all, the cuts simply mean government won’t be able to grow as quickly as it otherwise would. They are cuts from the expected increase. The 2013 federal budget still would be higher than the 2012 budget.

Giovanetti says it’s true that some jobs would be lost. “Finding new, more productive forms of employment for these workers will require growing the private sector economy rather than growing the government sector.”

If you transfer jobs from the government sector to the private sector, the economy will improve over time. (Read Giovanetti’s piece by clicking here.)

To be sure, sequestration is not the best way to right the nation’s fiscal ship. But politicians of both parties have proven themselves absolutely incapable of crafting a rational approach to fixing the problem.

You can be sure that sequestration, if allowed to commence on March 1, will last only as long as it takes either party to blink. Given the people involved, that may be a long time.

By then, however, the pain of irrational cuts may be absorbed and the nation could be on the road to a better fiscal future.

onerous requirement government imposed on it to pre-fund retiree health benefits 75 years into the future.

The group turns this into a real Republican vs. Democrat issue, with Republicans cast as “cheering” the recent move to eliminate Saturday delivery.

Well … a lot of Republicans may be backing the Saturday cut and pushing to privatize, but Democrats have been critical of the service, as well. Democratic Sen. Tom Carper of Delaware has called the Saturday plan inadequate to solve the Postal Service’s problems. He chairs the committee that oversees the service. (Click here to read story.)

Also, ColorOfChange clearly misunderstands the reasons why Congress in 2006 required the Postal Service to begin prepaying retiree health benefits, which it casts as a Bush administration move that is burdensome.

The requirement wasn’t to punish the agency or make it do something unreasonable. It was to make it come to terms with a real expense — retiree health care — that it hadn’t funded for decades.

This Bloomberg opinion piece by Josh Barro last summer explains the situation well. Private companies treat the accrual of retirement health care liabilities as a cost. Most government agencies do not, although they report them as a liability. But not treating them as a cost does not mean they are not, indeed, a cost.

In the old days, the Postal Service would pay for its retiree’s health benefits on a pay-as-you-go basis. Barro wrote, “Because the cost of actually providing health care to retirees in a given year is less than the value of benefits current workers are accruing, that meant the post office was understating the cost of retiree health care.”

The promise of providing that health care is a debt, a promissory note, which must be paid one way or another. If the Postal Service is sold and privatized, either the buyer would have to pay it, or taxpayers would take the hit when the cost of the sale was reduced by the outstanding amount owed.

Or Congress could vote to pull the promised benefit out from under postal service workers, which would create other huge problems.

But the obligation can’t simply be wished away.

So what is it ColorOfChange.org would like to do? Its main concern seems to be the loss of jobs, particularly those of black women, should the service be drastically curtailed. That is a legitimate concern.

But so are the promised health benefits of those women, and others, once they retire.

And, contrary to what the group believes, the Postal Service cannot survive long without making itself much smaller.

Yes, Congress deserves a lot of blame, but not for making the Postal Service pay its obligations to retirees. It deserves blame for not giving the service the freedom it needs to deal with its problems. One of the ways to deal with that is to cut its days of service and reduce its workforce even further.

That’s a harsh reality. When it comes to dollars and cents and a changing industry, there unfortunately aren’t a lot of great ways to alleviate harshness.

people the right to bear arms, whether for self-defense or for hunting. (I’m a little fuzzier on the concept of armed citizens keeping the government from usurping our rights. We have a Constitution and three branches of government to protect those and, in any event, the government has an army. But that’s another discussion for another day.)

I get that people with concealed weapons permits can save lives. That happened last April in Salt Lake City when some guy started stabbing people at random while babbling something about, “You killed my people.” A regular guy with a gun put an end to that peacefully, forcing the knife guy to drop his weapon until police showed up.

Anyone who opposes the right to a concealed carry permit has to confront situations like these and explain how disarming everyone would be a good thing.

But my support for the Second Amendment begins to waver when I see people doing reckless things with that freedom.

Look at the photo from the legislative hearing. Why would you make such a visible display of a firearm at such a place? Was it really just to demonstrate that guns are not scary, or was it a not-so-subtle form of intimidation?

How does that belong in a chamber where ideas are supposed to be debated on their merits and proposed laws drafted? Do these people expect to gain public support by such a display?

Getting back to my original question, one of the ways to distinguish the nut-jobs from the responsible gun owners is to require a permit for people to carry a concealed weapon, and to make people demonstrate the ability to correctly load and fire that weapon as part of the permitting process.

Another way is to make it illegal to openly carry weapons in a provocative or disruptive way, such as by carrying several of them, along with ammunition, into a shopping mall in an age when mass shooting rampages frequent daily news reports.

But in an extreme over-reaction to President Obama’s drive for tougher gun laws, Utah lawmakers are considering HB76, which would remove the need for any permit at all to carry a concealed weapon, provided the person is at least 21 and otherwise legally able to possess a weapon.

This provision would be tacked onto the end of a law that details how it is illegal to carry weapons on the premises of any public or private school. If it passes, just about anyone over 21 would get a King’s X on those restrictions.

Lawmakers also are considering HB268, which says, “The mere carrying or possession of a holstered or encased firearm, whether visible or concealed, without additional behavior or circumstances that would cause a reasonable person to believe the holstered or encased firearm was carried or possessed unlawfully or with criminal intent, does not constitute a violation of this section.”

The key there is what a “reasonable person” would believe. I think a reasonable shopper at JC Penney would think someone loaded to the teeth is disruptive. Clearly, many of the people at Wednesday’s hearing would think otherwise.

Another bill, HB114, would let sheriffs arrest federal agents who want to confiscate the guns of Utahns.

That one can’t even seriously be considered a waste of money, because it would be thrown out of court so fast few legal fees would accrue.

Obama is not going to succeed with even an assault weapons ban. The Republican-led House won’t stand for it. Utah looks absolutely foolish tilting at this windmill.

The state’s gun laws are not so strict that people are demanding they be loosened. Nor is there a discernible problem these laws would fix — except for stopping people from bringing an arsenal with them on a shopping trip.

Or perhaps keeping them from packing heat at a legislative hearing.

Apparently, a lot of baby boomers are not running off to an easy retirement in Belize. They aren’t looking for that perfect home near a golf course, where they can while away the hours arguing with their homeowner’s association. They’re hoping to just keep roofs over their heads.

And forget about the notion that older people are more prudent and careful with money than the young whippersnappers. At least when it comes to people who carry debt, this survey found quite the opposite — middle-income Americans over 50 now owe more on cards than those under 50.

The older set carries an average combined balance of $8,278, compared with $6,258 for the younger set. The good news is that these balances fell over the past five years for both age categories, but it fell just 16 percent for the older folks, which is like tossing some furniture off the Queen Mary.

There is reason to believe that at least some of the younger people improved their debt situation only because their older relatives bailed them out — using credit cards. Twenty-three percent of older Americans in the survey said they used cards to pay off the debts of relatives. In turn, 18 percent of the people surveyed between ages 50 and 64 dipped into their retirement savings to pay their credit card bills.

Generosity is admirable, but the grim financial reaper isn’t shedding any tears.

When it comes to the reasons people charge, there are few surprises. Forty-nine percent of older Americans do so to pay for car repairs, and 38 percent used them for home repairs. Younger people are much more likely to charge non-essential items, either small or large. About a quarter or both age categories reported losing a job and having to rely on credit cards to live.

Half of the older indebted Americans charged health care costs, carrying an average balance of $893. About a third of people in all age categories said they had postponed health treatments or prescription purchases because they no longer could afford them.

The survey doesn’t offer a lot of reason for hope. Virtually everyone is going to need a sudden repair or health care, especially as they get older. Once you begin relying on a plastic safety net, the hole just seems to get bigger and bigger.

When the survey asked about strategies, the answers ranged from looking forward to a tax refund, to taking an extra job, to raiding those retirement funds.

In other words, their ideas are just as realistic as the meaningless battles in Congress over tax hikes or spending cuts.

It’s easy to over-react to surveys like this. A little in-home sequestration would be good for some people. But it’s also easy to feel a false sense of smugness. The report offers a glimpse at a portion of the public that lives above its means, but not all people with credit card debts are irresponsible. Health care costs pose a genuine challenge, as does the sudden loss of employment.

And the debts these folks have will need to be settled somehow, eventually. Whether it ends in bankruptcy, ruined credit, the loss of a home or a write-off by a hospital or financial institution, society bears some of the cost.

Whether in Washington or at the kitchen table, when bills come due and no one has a long-term plan, it’s never pretty.

Today’s rhetoric from President Obama is nothing new.

With the latest version of the fiscal cliff looming March 1, and with many Americans approaching April 15 like schoolchildren with an assignment due, it may be instructive to pause a moment and contemplate an anniversary that has gone largely unnoticed, and certainly uncelebrated.

One hundred years ago this month, Wyoming won a three-way race with New Jersey and New Mexico to become the state that officially put the tally at three-fourths of all state legislatures to ratify the 16th Amendment to the Constitution, which legalized the personal income tax.

Thank you, neighbors to the north.

This seemed a popular move at the time, with news reports speculating Congress would exempt everyone earning less than $5,000 a year. In reality, single people earning more than $3,000 and married couples earning more than $4,000 ended up being taxed 1 percent, up to $20,000 in income (a whopping $463,826 in 2012 dollars). The highest rate, for the very rich, was 7 percent.

But the rules began to change rapidly, and the tax spread like water from a leaky pipe.

Less than a quarter century later, the popular play, “You can’t take it with you” won the Pulitzer Prize. Its most sympathetic character was Martin Vanderhof, or “Grandpa,” a happy-go-lucky old man who proudly tells an IRS agent he has never paid a cent of income tax because he doesn’t believe in it and because he is sure the government wouldn’t know what to do with his money if he paid it.
At the time the play opened, in 1936, the bottom marginal rate was 4 percent for everyone earning up to $4,000 in income, and it was 79 percent at the top. But the culture of deductions already had taken root, making it difficult to easily calculate how much people actually were paying.

From the earliest years, the tax code made reality quite different from outward appearances. As Time magazine recently noted, the rich actually pay more when their marginal rate is lower. Among other reasons for this, when rates are high, the wealthy search harder for loopholes. In those early days, for instance, the rich often incorporated their wealth, which allowed them to pay at the much lower corporate income tax rate.

One month before the income tax became legal a century ago, the Wall Street Journal wondered aloud how much taxation a nation could handle. “The assumption seems to be made in certain quarters — particularly by those who do not have to pay directly themselves — that the tax-bearing resources of modern society are unlimited,” an editorial said before drawing ominous comparisons between where things seemed to be heading and ancient Rome, “when farms were so heavily taxed that they were deserted by their owners...”

Those worries, it turned out, were overblown. Instead, however, the worst part of the income tax is that its branches have grown into a hopelessly tangled mess of rules and loopholes.

The tax code now fills nearly 74,000 pages and continues to grow yearly. Two years ago, a board appointed by President Obama and led by former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volker estimated Americans spend a combined 7.6 billion hours and $140 billion a year to wade through all the rules and file their returns.
This is because the ability to directly tax individuals allows government to reward behavior it deems appropriate, such as buying house or giving to charity, and also to reward businesses powerful enough to lobby for breaks.

Which brings up the third thing that can be said about taxes in America. They may be as inevitable as death, but they themselves are not likely to die.

monuments will be filled with wireless waves allowing visitors to use their cellphones, iPads and other devices.

Forget about getting away from it all to fill your natural senses with nothing but the sounds and sights of nature’s greatest wonders. You’ll have to share them with big shots negotiating important deals, with people catching up with the folks at home and with kids who want to stay in their tents watching movies all day.

Well, I’ve got news for you, Grizzly Adams. A lot of national parks are not exactly escapes from civilization, especially during peak seasons. When you’re looking for an experience with nature, people are annoyances, and they’re everywhere in a national park.

So don’t get too worked up over this Reuters report that says telecommunications companies and lots of park visitors are putting pressure on the service to make parks more accessible to mobile devices. Telephone calls and people standing around the Grand Canyon playing “Angry Birds” would be annoying, all right, but only in a matter of degrees from what you experience already.

Plus, there could be some advantages. If you get lost or injured, having a working cell phone could be a lifesaver. That’s an obvious benefit. But what about a mobile app that acts as a guide?

I’ve been in plenty of museums where patrons can rent a device that provides detailed information about paintings or displays. I find that these enhance the experience and add to the learning. An app could do this. It also could warn you in real time about approaching bad weather or give you the shortest route back to your cabin or camp.

Sure, some people will abuse the privilege. They will text when they should be looking at something magnificent. They will be chatting with Aunt Mabel in Poughkeepsie about her bunions when they should be absorbing a grand vista.

People are like that. If they can’t use their phones, they will find some other way to annoy you.

The biggest question concerning this matter has to do with cost. The Park Service just released a memo outlining the money it will lose if Congress can’t find a way to avoid “sequestration,” the automatic cuts that take effect March 1 without a grand compromise on long-term budget issues.

Without such a deal, you may be back to typing out dispatches to the civilized world on your portable manual Underwood or scrawling with a pen on a post card.

Hey, those limitations didn’t stop Jack London from writing some memorable stuff.

Tuba City is on the Navajo reservation in northern Arizona. It isn’t really on the way to anything. Find the Grand Canyon, then drive east for about 50 miles. It’s actually the largest city in the Navajo Nation, but it is home to fewer than 10,000 people.

I mention this because a new report by the Tax Foundation in Washington identifies Tuba City as having the highest sales tax rate in the United States, when you combine both state and local taxes.

If you pick up a pack of gum on your way through town, be prepared to pay an extra 13.725 percent. That includes a 6 percent tribal tax.

My guess, however, is that Tuba City retailers don’t lose a lot of business because of high taxes. Sure, that kind of rate may keep a corporation from moving its headquarters there. But really, Tuba City is the sort of place you have to go out of your way to see, and I doubt many people would move there, or drive there to shop, if the sales tax was zero.

That’s not so in other places, where sales taxes are used as selling points. And yet the interior West, Tuba City notwithstanding, has generally low sales tax rates despite long distances between cities.

The report ranks states both by their statewide sales tax rates and their combined state and local rates, adjusted for population. That is, a small place like Tuba City has a relatively small impact on Arizona’s total score.

Arizona, however, still has the second highest overall rate in the nation.

Authors of the report (read it by clicking here) make a point of how businesses, states and even cities use their relative sales tax rates as lures for shoppers. This is especially true in areas were populated areas straddle borders.

At the border to Delaware, for instance, the state uses its welcome sign to tell motorists it is “home of the tax-free shopping.” Oregon has no sales taxes. Some people choose to live in Vancouver, Wash., just across the border from Portland, Ore., so they can live in a state with no income tax and do their tax-free shopping in Oregon.

Local tax rates also lure shoppers from high-tax inner cities to low-tax suburbs.

The report says “state and local governments should be cautious about raising rates too high relative to their neighbors because doing so will amount to less revenue than expected, or in extreme cases, revenue losses despite the higher tax rate.”

My guess, however, is that this is less true in the interior West.

Utah has the 28th highest overall state and local sales tax rate. As I’ve mentioned, its southern neighbor, Arizona, ranks second, but Wyoming, just to the north, ranks 42nd.

I have heard talk of Utahns driving to Wyoming to buy high-powered fireworks that are illegal at home, or to Idaho to buy lottery tickets. But those are novelty items. Salt Lake City is about 90 minutes from Evanston, Wyo. I’ve never heard of anyone going up there to buy furniture or clothing or electronics. The savings would be minimal after the cost of gas is included.

A low tax rate still is one of the selling points for luring companies to your area, combined with a host of other factors. Arizona’s weather probably outweighs its sales tax rate when businesses make  those decisions, just as Wyoming’s weather may offset its low rate.

It is interesting, however, that sales tax rates in the interior West remain generally lower than average (with the exception of Arizona and Nevada), despite their distance from neighboring states.

Now, if those unfortunate folks in Tuba City only had a nearby place to shop that wasn’t on tribal land.

considering overpopulation adherents have believed themselves on the side of science since Thomas Malthus wrote “An essay on the principles of population” in 1798. Never mind that his predictions of starvation and disease as a result of population growth have been thoroughly discredited by world history since then. Today’s believers hold to articles of faith concerning things like the earth’s carrying capacity.

“Carrying capacity?” Last says. “Certainly, earth must have one, but there is no good research on this.” True believers apparently don’t need it.

I spoke with Last on the day his book, “What to expect when no one’s expecting,” was released. It was only a few days after his equally provocative essay, “America’s baby bust,” was published by the Wall Street Journal.

Last, a senior writer at the Weekly Standard, believes the real crisis America faces is not its national debt or any looming fiscal crisis. Instead, it is its fertility rate, or lack thereof. Today, that rate is 1.93. The replacement rate is 2.1. Unless we make more babies, the nation is in for a world of trouble.

Our interview dovetailed nicely with Eric Schulzke’s recent report in the Deseret News, titled, “Studies show social cost of fewer families.” It examined how a rapid shift away from traditional families among young Americans (more than 50 percent of adults today are single, compared with 22 percent in 1950) will affect the future. Some places in the world already face this crisis. In shrinking Singapore, the report noted, the government is offering cash premiums for children, with greater amounts going to those with multiple kids.

The United States is, of course, not shrinking. Last says we can thank immigration for that, but we can’t count on it for long. Birthrates are falling south of the border. “Mexico is right at replacement level,” he said, and it is falling.

All the arguing over immigration reform in Congress may be over a problem that soon won’t exist. The entire world is voluntarily going infertile. Demographers, Last said, believe world population will peak in about 60 to 70 years, then begin to decline.

The result will be a population that skews toward the elderly, without enough young workers to support them.

Last uses data to argue that population growth leads to innovation, invention and conservation. He echoes a report I wrote about long ago, titled, “It’s getting better all the time,” that enumerates the many ways in which life has improved over the last century alone.

Commodity prices have come down, diseases have been cured, and water and air have become cleaner. Without an expanding population, the next century won’t see such gains, and things likely will get worse.

Only when our conversation turns to a solution does Last become uncertain. Neither liberals nor conservatives have one, he said.  The only hope is a “changing of the culture.”

Religion holds a big key. Last cites statistics showing a correlation between regular church attendance and large families. Regardless of denomination, he said, most religions teach “there are things more important than you are.”

To have children, especially many of them, you have to buy into the idea that there is a benefit to sacrificing your own desires and gratification.

He is impressed with how Brigham Young University provides married student housing. States, he said, should offer this at more universities, at least allowing the option of being married with children while doing undergraduate work.

Beyond that, government could be more welcoming of religion in the public square and could find ways to break up the “college cartel” that has led to skyrocketing tuition costs, which discourage young people from assuming the added cost of children.

Already, pundits have assailed Last for attacking Malthus and his doctrine. Few I’ve seen so far have confronted his data directly. Perhaps they worry it would shake their theology.