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An astute observer at the State Capitol put it to me this way: Human beings differ from other animals in that they can lengthen the time between stimulus and response through reason and thought. Provoke an animal and it probably will lash out immediately in self defense. Provoke a human and he or she might take awhile to assess the situation before deciding how to respond. But that time begins to shorten significantly when people begin to feel confused, overwhelmed or under attack.
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A few years ago, after meeting with a deputy executive director of UNICEF, I couldn’t help noticing the irony.
He was excited about how the widespread availability of vaccines was providing hope to parents in the Third World. Meanwhile, many privileged, educated Americans were refusing to vaccinate their children — voluntarily accepting the risk of returning the mayhem impoverished countries are so anxious to escape. To Jim Ferrin, tax reform is more than just an abstract concept. If Utah lawmakers succeed in making a law out of the roughly 260-page bill that became public last Wednesday and zipped through a House committee on Thursday, he may have a decision to make.
Try to deal with the cost and hassle of collecting sales taxes from his many clients spread throughout Utah, move somewhere else or find a different line of work. Utah lawmakers are on the verge of enacting sweeping tax reform with less than two weeks to go in their annual 45-day session, which ends March 14. The bill, HB441, contains 8,030 lines of type. It is by no means the only thing to be considered during the final days. How many lawmakers have read it? State Rep. Susan Duckworth went through her annual windmill-tilting exercise Wednesday, trying to get fellow lawmakers to support her bill to make all feminine hygiene products, diapers and similar items exempt from sales taxes in Utah.
The Democrat from Magna has carried this bill unsuccessfully for four years now. On Wednesday, the House Revenue and Taxation Committee listened politely, then voted to hold the bill, effectively killing it once more. This time, however, the reason given was that everyone is waiting on a huge tax-overhaul bill to emerge from somewhere deep within the marbled walls of the State Capitol. About that, two things may be observed. Could Utah’s recent little earthquakes trigger a volcano in Yellowstone? Has anyone checked on the dormant volcanoes around our state to see whether they’re getting ready to spew lava? Is my house about to be swallowed? Aaargh!
First, calm down. The answers to the first two, actually posed by worried callers to people at University of Utah seismograph stations, is no. In the words of modern day poet Anthony Liccione, “They say, timing is everything. But then they say, there is never a perfect time for anything.”
Certainly, there never is any time at all for what Carlo Alazo, a 22-year-old from Tampa, Florida, is accused of doing. Of all the things Americans take for granted, water is near the top.
Getting information should should be somewhere near the top, too. After all, this is the Information Age, right? But back to water for a second: We turn the tap and expect an endless supply of life-giving, clean wetness to come out, either hot or cold, depending on how we want it. We shower in it, drink it, brush our teeth with it, cook with it and wash dishes in it. As much as 60 percent of our bodies are made up of the stuff. Dark times seems to bring out the worst in Americans. Despite all the outward displays of unity after 9/11, there were calls to round up people of Middle Eastern descent. Members of the Sikh religion, whose men grow long beards and wear turbines but have nothing remotely to do with
the radical fundamentalists who attacked the United States, found themselves the subject of frequent violence. This remains true today. In that sense, little has changed since the days immediately following the attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. Quick quiz: When was the following published in a major newspaper?
“While most have been worrying about the public debt and its unwieldy proportions, private debt too has been sneaking up on us … . The situation could make a readjustment in the case of a recession very difficult. It was the attempted liquidation through the market of a vast volume of private debt that brought on the 1929 debacle, at least in large part.” You probably guessed it wasn’t written yesterday, or I wouldn’t have quoted it. But it could have been. Today’s problems have plenty of echoes from the past. You didn’t really think lawmakers would stop after messing with Proposition 3, did you?
Now it’s time to get at what some of them see as the real problem — the initiative process itself. The thinking goes like this: Last November, voters were faced with a ballot measure that asked, right up front, if they would raise the gas tax by 10 cents per gallon to help fund education. It failed miserably. |
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The author
Jay Evensen is the Senior Editorial Columnist of the Deseret News. He has 32 years experience as a reporter, editor and editorial writer in Oklahoma, New York City, Las Vegas and Salt Lake City. He also has been an adjunct journalism professor at Brigham Young and Weber State universities. Archives
August 2018
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