At the end of a recent talk, I agreed to answer questions from the audience. One has had me pondering ever since.

It went something like this: “Do you think leaders in Salt Lake and Utah counties will impose a tax increase for transit even though voters rejected it three years ago?”

It’s an important question, given that the state Legislature has made it easy, and quite tempting, for those counties to do so.

Put differently, however, the question could be stated this way: What is the value of a public vote, which is a form of direct democracy, in a republic?

Thirty-five years ago, on my first day as a sports reporter at the tiny Clinton Daily News in Oklahoma, publisher and owner Charles Engleman made it clear that the terms of my employment required me to join a service club.

I didn’t have a choice. I was to be a Jaycee; end of discussion.

We had four full-time employees in our tiny newsroom. Each one belonged, by assignment, to something — Rotary, Kiwanis, Lions. For a town of just under 10,000, Clinton had thriving chapters of each, and the paper’s owner had a big hand in that. He believed deeply in the need to voluntarily make the town a better place.

He understood, in other words, that wealth could be measured in things other than dollars; that people who were part of a large social network, and that included church membership, were rich, in a real sense, as were places where residents learned to take pride in their surroundings and responsibility for each other.

What happened to that postcard we were supposed to use to file our income tax returns?

A lot of us might be missing it this weekend — so much that we might want to send all those promises of simplified returns a postcard of our own. Having a nice time filling out these forms, wish you were here.

President Trump promised the card again recently, telling a group in West Virginia, “this will be the 

It’s springtime, and a young man’s fancy turns to tax hikes, disappearing farmland, vaping and other things.
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OK, so I’m not a young man and I’m not terribly fancy, either. But here are my thoughts as spring begins.

When the founders of Google first developed a search engine in 1996, they named it “backrub.”

The idea was that the program looked at “back links” to understand and rate a website’s importance, according to Businessinsider.com.

A year later, they rebranded as Google. It was supposed to be Googol, after the large number that includes a 1 followed by 100 zeroes, but one of the 

Viewers of the nearly 200 television stations owned by the Sinclair Broadcast Group, including Channel 2 in the Salt Lake market, probably didn’t think much recently when they saw news anchors in promotional spots saying something like, “…we’re concerned about the troubling trend of irresponsible, one sided news stories plaguing our country.”

But if they were paying attention, they may have heard echoes from the White House when the anchors went on to say, “More alarming, some media outlets publish these same fake stories… stories that just aren’t true, without checking facts first.”

“Fake stories.” There’s that phrase that has become virtually meaningless in public discourse today, other than to identify something someone didn’t like to hear — all while, like a silent, freedom-eating bacteria, eroding faith in almost everything people hear.

​The promo didn’t get specific about the identities 

“It’s not just about whether a politician is lying or not. It’s whether he’s lying on my behalf.” – Monika McDermott, professor of political science at Fordham University.
 
Perhaps the most misleading notion pervading political discourse today is that politicians should be judged harshly for violating certain key principles of honesty — marital fidelity, the proper use of campaign funds, etc. — only if they have 

Whoever said, “the only thing that is constant is change” obviously had nothing to do with building a convention hotel in Salt Lake City.

I wrote my first column on the perceived need for such a thing 23 years ago. We’re still waiting for dirt to be turned, and conventions are still telling Visit Utah, the county-supported convention and visitors’ bureau, they would love to come but they don’t want their delegates spread around the city in lots of different hotels.

When it comes to giving away taxpayer money to companies, a new Brookings Institute study notes politicians like to use the “but for” test.

It goes like this: “But for this incentive, company X would not be making this investment.”

However, it’s important to note that the “but for” test depends on your perspective. A rival company that already exists in a market might say, “But for this incentive to my competitor, I could earn a 

Utahns had to experience a painful, prolonged and ultimately tragic case involving a public official with dementia before finally getting a smidgen of a glimmer of a hope that such cases could be handled with dignity in the future.

In its just-completed session, the Legislature passed SB38, which sets up a procedure for possibly removing an elected county officer who is mentally incapacitated. It could apply only to six counties because it was politically impossible to pass anything broader.

That means the situation involving the late Salt Lake County recorder Gary Ott, who was protected from the media by top staffers despite exhibiting clear signs of dementia, could repeat itself in any of the other 23 counties without recourse.

But despite that partial and tentative first step, it should be evident now that lawmakers need to take