Perhaps the best way to understand weather in the West is to imagine an old vaudeville sketch. A man, weak and near death, enters the stage on his knees, crawling amid sand and sagebrush, his voice rasping out a desperate cry for help. “Water! Water!”

Suddenly, from off stage, come bucketsful of water, right in the face, until the man finds himself in peril of drowning.

News accounts about Utah’s decision to lower the drunk-driving threshold to a .05 blood alcohol level have been predictable. Once the governor signed the bill, the Associated Press and others felt obligated to begin their stories by noting this was happening in “predominantly Mormon” Utah.

Yes, that is a true statement, and yes, it is true the state in fact is lowering the threshold to .05. It’s just the connection between the two that’s a bit sketchy.

A century ago, the income tax had been around only four years, but news stories of the day sound as fresh as this morning’s tweets.

The New York Sun called the tax, “Baffling to the lay mind since its inception …” and noted that in 1917 “new complications beset those having taxable incomes this year by reason of the amendments incorporated in the tariff act last September.”

Little did folks know the complications had only 

In politics, issues ebb and flow with public moods. Some of the ones caught in a receding tide deserve more lasting attention, however.
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Nearly 20 years ago, under the urging of then First Lady Jackie Leavitt, Utah established a marriage commission and placed it under the governor’s office. That was when Republicans held family values high atop their list of priorities. The idea was to find ways to promote stable families and protect children from the often-debilitating effects of divorce.

Of all the bills the 2017 Utah Legislature passed, only one seems to engender a strong and immediate negative response from people I engage in casual conversation.
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What the heck were they thinking when they eliminated the need for vehicle safety inspections? Do they not care that we’re all going to die as the duct tape loses its sticky and parts start flying down I-15?

When public solutions become complicated — such as the way politicians are fashioning new “resource centers” for the homeless along the Wasatch Front — it’s useful to step back and ask the “blank slate” question.

That is, if you had a blank slate and could design from scratch the ideal way to help the homeless, is this how it would look?

Would you build three equally large “resource centers,” each charged with handling separate types of homeless people who, inconveniently, don’t come in equally large numbers? Would you spread them out to various locations away from services the homeless need? Would you deliberately build 

People in Salt Lake City must not be as happy as those in the rest of Utah.

That’s the only logical conclusion to draw from the latest city-by-city happiness report from wallethub.com.
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A team of researchers there looked at “the various findings of positive-psychology research” and applied them to the nation’s 150 largest cities. Salt Lake City finished a respectable 49th on the list. That was better than most, but nothing like No. 1 Fremont, Calif., or No. 2 San Jose.

When I asked Utah Senate President Wayne Niederhauser an obvious question near the end of the legislative session — “Won’t it be harder to pass a tax reform bill next year because it is an election year?” — he nodded without hesitation.
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And when I added, “And won’t it be even harder if an initiative process is underway to raise taxes for schools?” he said, “Maybe that’s the kind of pressure we need.”

 “No one else was in the room where it happened/No one really knows how the game is played/The art of the trade/How the sausage gets made”
-Lyrics from the Broadway musical Hamilton
 
I don’t know whether Utah Senate President Wayne Niederhauser or his colleagues are fans of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical hit Hamilton, or of its subplot involving Aaron Burr being left out of important closed-door discussions.

It never did add up.

Day after day during this legislative session, Senate leaders told the media how restoring the full sales tax on food would stabilize sales taxes overall. When times are bad, people no longer buy furniture or cars, they said, but everyone has to buy food.

Taxing food would help the state weather bad times, and it would help shore up a general fund that seems to be stagnating even in the best of times.

But the experts said restoring the food tax would bring in about $175 million per year, and that seemed so paltry compared to a general fund of more than $2 billion, and especially against an overall state budget that totals more than $15 billion this fiscal year.
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It seemed especially paltry when compared to the cost to the state’s poorest residents. True, the rich also benefit from a state sales tax that is only 1.75 percent on groceries. But raising that tax to the full