Blog Posts - Jay Evensen

20 years later, what is the value of charter schools in Utah?

5/8/2019

Two decades ago, Pinnacle Canyon Academy, a charter school in Price, had the audacity to start a high school in a wing of a local motel.

If you know anything about charters, this really wasn’t such a crazy idea. Many make due with whatever facilities are available and leave the glass palaces to the public schools in traditional districts.

But motels don’t exactly conjure idyllic images of school days and the three Rs.

So, why is tax reform necessary in Utah again?

5/7/2019

At long last, the members of a task force that might redo Utah’s tax system have been publicly announced.
I say “might” because successfully changing tax law won’t be easy.

Ten state lawmakers, including two Democrats, plus four nonvoting tax experts who supposedly will guide the discussions with a dry-eyed sense of reality, will try to craft a better tax structure within the bounds of what is politically possible.

But will they be up to the challenge of answering this essential question: Why is reform necessary in the first place?

Cashless society is taking its sweet time getting here

5/2/2019

To correctly predict the future is virtually impossible, even if you’re an expert on the subject at hand. So when someone gets it mostly right, they deserve a shout out.

Which is why Norman H. Carter needs three cheers, belatedly.

Back in 1969, he was the vice president of the Computer Sciences Institute in El Segundo, Calif. That’s when he told the Pasadena Rotary Club that a cashless society was on the way.

It would be nice to have a bitcoin for the thoughts of those in attendance.

Why Utahns are so susceptible to affinity fraud

4/30/2019

Research shows that the more intelligent a person is, the more trusting he or she is of other people.
Oh my, Utahns must be awfully smart.

Forty-five years ago, the Wall Street Journal reported that Salt Lake City was gaining a reputation as the stock fraud capital of the country. That story (I retrieved it using Proquest) said securities regulators and SEC staffers referred to the place as the “sewer of the securities industry.”

Want to fix Social Security? Have more babies

4/24/2019

The newest report from the Social Security Board of Trustees was released Monday. Unfortunately, a lot of people are missing the point.

Yes, the report actually moves back the projected date at which Social Security’s costs will exceed the taxes collected for the program, to 2020. The date at which the program’s retirement payments are expected to completely exhaust its reserve was moved one year back, to 2035, but the program’s disability payments now are projected to be in good shape until 2052, which is 20 years later than previously projected.

How Democrats would influence Utah's tax reform efforts

4/23/2019

When you’re the minority party, and especially a minority as small as Democrats in Utah — comprising just 21 percent of the 104 combined Senate and House members — it can be hard to get ahead of an issue as big as tax reform.

So when House Democrats announced this week they will hold a series of public meetings on the issue in May, it sounded as futile as a family deciding to hold a family council meeting to complain about its property tax assessment. In the end, Democrats have little power to affect the outcome, which will rest largely in the hands of a legislative task force expected to begin meeting later this spring, with only two Democrats among its 10 members.

Forget Trump; why not make all our tax returns public?

4/10/2019

Forget about Donald Trump’s tax returns. I want to know how much my neighbors paid in taxes.

Scratch that. I have wonderful neighbors, most of whom have lived on my street longer than the 27 years my wife and I have been there.

It’s the people a few blocks away I wonder about. How much do they earn last year and what did they pay?

Has ranked choice voting's day arrived in Utah?

4/9/2019

When it comes to the way people vote in Utah, change is hard.

Hard, but not impossible.

In the next few days, we will just how many cracks and fissures are developing in the stone-encrusted, traditional way of doing things, where every candidate on the ballot competes to see who gets the most votes outright.

NYC-style congestion tolls are what Utah needs

4/3/2019

A few years ago, while on an ambitious coast-to-coast baseball road trip with my oldest son, I drove through New York City.

I don’t mean I drove by it on major highways. I navigated through Manhattan and Brooklyn in search of old stadium sites. If you look closely, you can find vestiges of the old Polo Grounds and plaques where Ebbets Field and even Hilltop Park, first home of the Yankees (then called the Highlanders) once stood.

Things to think about as tax month begins

4/2/2019

A recent study found that Utah is the nation’s second least stressed state. I would have read the whole thing, but I was too busy and too worried about a million different things to take the time.

Sort of makes you wonder what life is like in the other 48 states, doesn’t it? Or perhaps you wonder what life is like in Minnesota, that frozen Shangri-la the survey said was less stressful than here.

Because April has poked its head into our lives like some struggling crocus fighting brown earth and a late-season snow, your major stressor right now may be taxes. If so, it’s worth pondering that politicians should be glad tax day, whether by design or otherwise, comes in the middle of April and not near Election Day in November. Not a lot of incumbents would be re-elected if people had to drop off their ballots and tax returns at the Post Office simultaneously.

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