Blog Archives - Jay Evensen

Times are good, so why don't we save for the bad times?

6/27/2018

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Take a good look around you, and then savor the moment.

Unemployment in Utah just fell to 3 percent, which is just a little better than the national rate of 3.8 percent. Billboards aimed a business owners are popping up along the Wasatch Front. They offer to help companies hire the right kind of employee in an age when almost no one with qualifications is looking for a job.

Gas prices are up, but it isn’t clear whether people are changing their summer vacation plans. Just whip out the credit cards and go.

Do we really need that roads/transit tax hike right now?

6/27/2018

File this under, “Things that ought to drive taxpayers nuts.”

You and I know taxes don’t exist in a vacuum. When politicians on the city, county, state and federal levels begin chattering about raising them, and about how little their share will cost you, no one, except you, is adding up the total damage.

And when something big gets reported on in the news — some cataclysmic tax change such as the

We need to pay more for the water we use

6/20/2018

I like interactive websites that let you pretend you’re a politician faced with a difficult problem. The U.S. Geological Survey site has one that makes you a mayor in a city with a water crisis. What will you do?

Fortunately, I know the answer to that, because the website also calculates the total results from everyone who plays, broken down by state.

Of the 686 Utahns who had participated as of

Inland port's conflict-of-interest squabble feeds cynicism

6/19/2018

Cynicism, that hardiest of weeds on the soul, requires only an example or two to take root, and then it feeds well on mere suspicions.

And right now, some members of the new board overseeing the Utah Inland Port Authority, including outgoing House Speaker Greg Hughes, are, to put it delicately, weed food.

The board was supposed to hold its first public meeting Monday, but everything fell apart rather

Fertility rate decline is something to be feared

6/13/2018

Two recent news stories have made me think about the future with fear and trepidation.

One is the report by the trustees of Social Security that said the nation’s premiere retirement account is bringing in less than it needs for the first time since 1982, and that Medicare isn’t doing well, either.

The second is that the fertility rate in the U.S. has dropped to a record low, a rate of less than 1.8 children per woman. Demographers define the replacement rate — the rate at which the current generation can replace itself without declining — at 2.1. We haven’t been there in a while.

The two are related. It shouldn’t be too difficult to see that.

Under current conditions, fixing Social Security and Medicare would be possible with some relatively painless reforms, if Congress and the president act

Salt Lake County has to get this housing project right

6/12/2018

The Olympia development may be a mammoth housing and commercial project that — like Oz on a western horizon so distant it would catch the morning sun even later than Daybreak — would lure about 30,000 people into mostly high-density housing on a 930-acre swath of unincorporated desert west of Herriman.

But it is so much more.

For one thing, it is a test that could determine how

Social Security is going bankrupt and no one seems to care

6/7/2018

Frankly, I was surprised by how little attention the news out of Washington got on Tuesday — that the Social Security program has to dip into its trust fund for the first time since 1982.

Oh, there were stories in the major media. You may have heard it on morning radio programs.

But by afternoon the nation was focused on more interesting things, such as the president disinviting

Why give mammoth Facebook a tax break on data center?

6/7/2018

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A little more than 10 years ago, Google decided to pit North and South Carolina against each other in a competition to win a large, new data center. Only after getting promises of big tax incentives from each did the company reveal that (surprise!) it was going to build two centers after all, one in each state.

Stop me if you’ve heard this before.

Facebook’s decision to build data centers in both

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