Recent editorials from Alabama newspapers:
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Nov. 4
The Decatur Daily and The TimesDaily on the switch to standard time:
This time of year reminds Americans that they face a stark decision, one as clear as day vs. night:
Should we keep switching back and forth between standard time and daylight saving time?
This past Sunday, most Americans got an extra hour of sleep thanks to moving their clocks back an hour as most of the country switched back to standard time. Arizona and Hawaii are conscientious objectors to our twice-yearly exercise.
But, as the sci-fi writer Robert Heinlein observed, “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.” We’ll pay the piper come spring, when it will be time for our clocks to “spring forward” once again to daylight saving time.
That “lost hour” in the spring, however, may not be the only cost of the time change. There is mounting evidence that moving the clock back and forth two times each year exerts a toll on our health.
Dr. Beth Malow, sleep specialist with the Vanderbilt University Medical Center neurology department, favors year-round standard time.
“The switching is a hostile act against the body’s circadian rhythms that regulate the sleep-wake cycle,” reported The Philadelphia Inquirer, summing up Malow’s view.
“From a circadian standpoint, you are out of sync for eight months,” she said.
Even the extra sunlight at night may be bad for us. Malow says our bodies should be getting less light later at night so they can properly transition to sleep.
Other sleep specialists agree.
When the clocks go back at the end of daylight saving time, “People get frustrated because the sunsets are earlier,” Dr. Charles Czeisler told the Inquirer. But the negative effects attributed to moving the clocks forward - increases in the incidence of heart attacks and traffic accidents - trend in the other direction.
To put it simply: Our bodies know what time it’s supposed to be, and they’re confused when we behave otherwise.
But what about the other supposed benefits of daylight saving time, such as saving energy?
Benjamin Franklin is generally credited with coming up with the idea for daylight saving time in 1784 in order to conserve candles. The U.S. first adopted it during World War I to save oil and other resources. But when researchers finally got around to looking at the effect of daylight saving time during the 1970s, they found not much.
The U.S. Department of Transportation figured daylight saving time cut American’s energy use by about 1%. Studies since then have found about the same.
Indiana, which only recently adopted daylight saving time statewide, has provided useful data. A 2007 report, according to the website Livescience, “found that turning the clocks forward an hour during summer actually increases residential energy use by 1 percent. The increased energy use was particularly stark in October. Overall, the researchers concluded, daylight saving time does save on electricity for lighting, but it also increases the use of electricity for heating and cooling.”
Part of that is because lighting has become much more energy efficient.
And according to Scientific American, “California Energy Commission resource economist Adrienne Kandel and her colleagues discovered that extending daylight time (by three weeks since 2007) had little to no effect on energy use in the state. The observed drop in energy use of 0.2 percent fell within the statistical margin of error of 1.5 percent.”
So, we have a government policy that may not do what it’s supposed to do; it may do the opposite. And it has unintended negative consequences. Yet it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere because most Americans are too wedded to that extra hour of sunlight in the summer.
Online: https://www.decaturdaily.com/
Online: https://www.timesdaily.com/
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Oct. 29
The Decatur Daily and The TimesDaily on a New York Times report that President Donald Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes the year he ran for president and in his first year in the White House:
Lots has been said recently about how little President Donald Trump has paid in income taxes.
Trump has responded that he hired people to find legal loopholes to lower his tax bill.
Outrageous? Yes. But is Trump to blame? Not so much.
If all of the deductions and loopholes he has taken on his income taxes are legal, why would we blame him for taking advantage of the tax code? After all, who among us has said, for example, “I get this standard deduction, but I’m not going to take it so I can pay more taxes”?
Or “I won’t deduct my mortgage interest, or file an itemized return to take full advantage of all of the deductions I can to lower my tax bill”?
Or even, “I qualify for an earned income tax credit, but I want to pay as much in taxes as I can”?
The idea of doing that is ludicrous. We all want to lower our tax bill.
So who is to blame? The lawmakers who created a convoluted and confusing tax code.
Revamping the tax code is often mentioned at the congressional level. At 70,000-some pages, it has created a whole industry of tax accountants and attorneys. Many of those 70,000 pages are devoted to creating loopholes and breaks that keep wealthy pockets full. Which is how public school teachers find that they pay more in taxes than the president of the United States.
We don’t have the answer to what the tax code should be. Several options have been proposed, such as the flat tax, which has been floating around for about 20 years.
Most people who oppose the flat tax do so because they feel it unfairly burdens the poor. After all, 14% of a $10,000 income is a bigger bite to the bottom line than say 14% of $100,000. The percentage may be the same, but the impact is different. (Here’s the math: A family relying on $10,000 a year has $8,600 after taxes to stretch across 12 months, where a person making $100,000 has $86,000 to spend over 12 months).
Herman Cain once put forth his 9-9-9 plan, which is a 9% personal income tax, 9% federal sales tax and a 9% corporate tax. Seemingly simple, it again has a much more severe impact on the working poor than corporations and the rich.
Are either of these plans perfect? Not even close. But neither is what we have now. If we want things to change so that the wealthy, such as Donald Trump, pay their fair share, it’s up to us to demand our lawmakers take this issue seriously, and back that up with our vote.
Otherwise, our lawmakers have no incentive to act.
Online: https://www.decaturdaily.com/
Online: https://www.timesdaily.com/
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Oct. 28
The Dothan Eagle on three mental heath crisis centers slated to be built in Alabama:
Gov. Kay Ivey announced the site cities for three proposed mental health crisis centers on Wednesday, marking a significant step toward improvement of the state’s beleaguered Department of Corrections.
It’s long overdue.
Since the state shuttered four mental hospitals and numerous other facilities with the idea that those needed mental health treatment would do better in private facilities, more and more troubled people have fallen through the cracks, winding up on the streets, often untreated, and many times find their way into the state correctional system.
Among the deficiencies noted by the U.S. Department of Justice in a withering rebuke of the state’ decrepit prison system is the lack of adequate mental health care.
The centers, proposed earlier this year in the governor’s State of the State address, are intended to stabilize people with mental illness and fill gaps in services that sometimes leave few options other than hospital emergency rooms.
Mental Health Commissioner Lynn Beshear told the Associated Press that the centers will provide life-saving, short-term care for people battling episodes of mental illness who need a place to stabilize but who now sometimes wind up in jail because law enforcement officers have limited options. The centers will be operated by private providers around the clock, 365 days a year.
The proposal, which identifies facilities in Huntsville, Montgomery, and Mobile, should signal a model for future development of mental health centers in other Alabama communities. Society would not tolerate locking up people for physical ailments; those with mental illness deserve no less.
Online: https://www.dothaneagle.com/
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