All Categories - Jay Evensen

Why are new homeless shelters too small?

10/15/2019

From the start, the math didn’t work. Add up all the beds at three new homeless shelters — 300 at a men’s facility and 200 each at separate ones for women and mixed genders — and you still fall several hundred short of the 1,000 or so the Road Home shelter currently holds.

That’s in one of the nation’s fastest growing metro areas, where the need is sure to grow.

Whenever I asked officials about it, whenever I wondered what would happen on a bitter, cold night when even the most reluctant vagabond knew to come inside, the answers had to do with finding room here and there, with granting motel vouchers or with vague promises that the homeless would be quickly transitioned out of shelters and into more permanent housing.

Are we really tired of endless wars and foreign aid?

10/9/2019

Are Americans really weary over the “endless wars” President Trump spoke about before pulling troops out of Northern Syria and opening the way for Turkey to attack long-time U.S. Kurdish allies? Or do Americans really believe the U.S. has a lot to gain by remaining engaged in global affairs?

Those are two vastly different questions that cover two ways of looking at the same thing.

Quit whining; your tax burden is getting lighter

10/9/2019

File this under, “quit your whining.”

Of all the truisms in politics, this one has held steady throughout my years of observation: No one notices when their tax burden falls. People don’t party in the streets or throw confetti from tall buildings when they get to keep more of their hard-earned money gradually, over a period of years. We typically don’t notice anything that happens gradually, except maybe weight gain and hair loss.

How old is too old to run for president?

10/2/2019

Bernie Sanders has inadvertently raised a question a lot of Americans were reluctant to ask.
How old is too old to run for president?

When he entered a hospital Wednesday with chest discomfort and needed two stents to combat a blocked artery, the 78-year-old Sanders also put a new spotlight on the candidacies of Joe Biden, 76, Elizabeth Warren, 70, and even President Donald Trump, 73. At the moment, those four are the frontrunners in the 2020 race for the White House.

Vape flavors aren't the only problem

10/1/2019

Utah soon may join states that have banned flavored e-cigarettes. As the Deseret News reported this week, you can expect to see some bills at the Capitol in January.

But if lawmakers think that alone is the answer to the vaping crisis, they haven’t looked closely at the statistics.

Of the 805 lung disease cases reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as of last week, only 16% of the patients are under 18. Nearly two-thirds, 62%, are between 18 and 34. The rest, presumably, are older. Adults make up the largest share of those getting sick. It isn’t even close.

Note to politicians: Americans don't hate the rich

9/25/2019

A decade ago, hating the rich was all the rage. In cities across America, members of the “occupy” movement marched against the wealth concentration of the top 1%.

Usually somewhere across town, members of the Tea Party held similar demonstrations, generally aimed at politicians they felt were spending money too freely.

Build a park on prison site in Draper

9/24/2019

Now that an 11-member board is ready to begin remaking the large section of land in Draper where a state prison soon will be destroyed, it’s time to say this again: Make sure a large regional park is part of the plan.

I’m not just talking about green space. The plans we’ve seen so far include green swaths meandering between what designers hope are employee-filled business buildings. These are nice and important. Open spaces help a community breathe.

Admission scandal isn't higher education's only problem

9/18/2019

Do you believe actress Felicity Huffman got off with a light sentence — two weeks in prison, a $30,000 fine and community service — for paying someone to rig SAT answers so her daughter could be admitted to the acting school of her choice?

Or maybe you believe the sentence fit the crime, or perhaps that prison is too harsh.

I’m not going to shed much light on these questions, other than to pose another one. If Huffman, or the 51 other people charged in the college admissions scandal uncovered by an FBI probe known as “operation varsity blues,” had instead donated richly, and legally, to the school of their choice, and their children had been given preference on that basis, would it have been much different?

Face it, we need to pay more for water

9/18/2019

Remember all that snow last winter? Remember how rainy it seemed to be in the spring, right on through June?

Well, that was before bone-dry August.

The Escalante River may be as good an illustration as any of how fickle the weather can be in the interior West. According to the Natural Resources Conservation Service, the river still stands at 124 percent of normal precipitation for the entire water year, but only 19 percent so far in September.

Use your credit cards, but take advice from the ancestors

9/11/2019

Sometimes, you can learn a lot about today by leafing through the yellowed pages of old newspapers (or the not-so-yellowed pages of newspapers.com’s electronic archives).

In April of 1937, economist Roger Babson wrote an opinion piece that warned about the misuse of credit. It may be good to buy something you can’t afford if that that thing is a machine that will pay for itself over time by saving money, he said.

weebly statistics

weebly reliable statistics

weebly statistics