The legislature of the great state of Utah has just passed a $200 million income tax cut bill which reduces the state’s income tax rate from 4.85% to 4.65%. Two hundred million may sound significant, but the decrease in income taxes for a family making $80,000 a year will amount to $208, or roughly 57 cents a day. For families making less than that, the tax cut is estimated to cut taxes by as much as 22%, but for a family with a taxable income of $30,000, a 22% reduction is less than $200.

This is the second – or possibly third – year of “small” tax cuts, and those small percentages add up to significant dollars for the top five percent of Utah taxpayers but aren’t all that helpful for lower income taxpayers.

I’d rather see no tax cuts and the money used for public education funding, given that Utah teachers – all the way from kindergarten to the university level – aren’t that well paid and face, on average, some of the largest class sizes.

And just possibly, the state legislators might consider more funding for improving air quality along the Salt Lake City/Wasatch Front, since the pollution levels there are among the worst in the nation. That doesn’t take into account that wasteful water use is resulting in Salt Lake drying up, which also results in toxic dust from the exposed lakebed being blown into the air.

Both the air and water problems, as well as shortfalls in infrastructure, have been compounded by the fact that Utah has been the fastest-growing state in the U.S. from 2010 to 2023, with a total growth of 23.88%.

But, obviously, touting minuscule tax cuts that really only benefit the wealthiest taxpayers is really good politics. Whether it’s best in the long-term for the state and its people is another question.

What do Donald Trump, less reputable politicians, and dubious news sources all have in common?

Besides a certain sleaziness, they all have a tendency to present words and facts out of context in a way that distorts what actually occurred.

In all fields of expertise, presentation/observation/understanding of events and facts in context is vital. That’s why archeologists excavate so carefully, because the context in which objects are found can often reveal even more than the objects themselves.

It’s why courts use the phrase “the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”

As I’ve noted earlier, there’s a great deal of difference between the handling of classified documents by Donald Trump and by Joe Biden or Mike Pence, because the context in each instance is very different.

This lack of understanding also results in the misapplication and misunderstanding of certain phrases. The despicable Harvey Weinstein used a common and accurate phrase – “it’s a small world” as a threat to his victims which suggested that he knew enough people to blackball those women from getting future work in entertainment. There’s no doubt that Weinstein was using that phrase as a threat, but the plain fact is that the world of entertainment is a small world. So is the world of classical music. So is the political arena.

But when a classical music instructor told a pupil who’d displayed thoughtless and rude behavior to be careful in the future because classical music was a small world, the pupil complained that the instructor had issued a threat, when no threat was even implied. All the instructor meant was that a pattern of bad or thoughtless behavior would get around, and not to the student’s benefit, but the student likely didn’t understand the contextual difference.

But because of the Weinstein cases, and the publicity involving that phrase, what was an honest and accurate observation of a number of professional fields has become a toxic phrase, all because the media, especially, failed to understand the difference in context.

And, with Twitter, social media, and even mainstream media shortening everything, there’s a growing loss of context… and a corresponding lack of understanding that benefits no one.

I’ve noted earlier that weather forecasts for Cedar City tend to be hit or miss, possibly because Cedar City is roughly fifteen miles north of Black Ridge, and Black Ridge is the southern end of the plateau on which Cedar City is situated. South of Black Ridge, the ground drops close to three thousand feet in less than thirty miles.

I understand the difficulties this poses for forecasters, especially since Cedar City is not exactly a major metropolitan area, but as I write this, it’s been snowing consistently for the past six hours, and we’ve gotten about seven inches of snow, and it’s still falling.

All the forecasts say it’s partly cloudy and that we’ll have scattered snow showers.

I’ve lived in New England at the foot of the White Mountains, in Colorado at the foot of the Rocky Mountains and here in Cedar City, essentially between three mountain ranges, and in none of those places would seven inches of snow be considered intermittent snow flurries or showers.

Last night, Cedar City was supposed to have flurries. We got about three inches of snow.

I understand that the location of Cedar City makes forecasting difficult, but still stating that it’s partly cloudy with possible snow flurries as the snow continues to fall strikes me as either a continuing reliance on unreliable algorithms or incompetence, if not both. It’s one thing to miss a forecast; it’s another to report the current weather wrong – continually.

Or perhaps it’s just that none of those so-called meteorologists even bothered to check with any of the 50,000 -60,000 people who are experiencing those “scattered snow showers,” because algorithms are so much more accurate than real people, not to mention, cheaper.

Sometime back, I wrote about some of the “innovations” proposed and since implemented by the local university, in order to create a three-year bachelor’s degree, a degree pushed by the state legislature. One of those “innovations” was to cut the length of the semester by twenty-percent, without any increase in the length of classes or the number of classes. Despite all the rhetoric, what that has meant is that students aren’t learning as much.

I’d thought about detailing more of the so-called improvements in education and pointing out how they actually degrade learning and how most students today know less, have lower critical thinking skills than their predecessors, and have more difficulty learning and recalling material.

But there’s little point in that exercise. Most of the American people have turned their backs on what used to be the objective of education, especially higher education, and that was the ability to read and write critically, to think analytically, to understand what numbers actually mean, and to obtain the skills to be able to learn and to attain new skills on a lifelong basis.

Instead, public education, at least through the collegiate baccalaureate level, has largely become a charade of exercises in mastering objective tests and obtaining paper credentials in the hopes of leveraging an inadequate education and an overstated degree into a job that will provide an adequate income.

It’s also become an incredibly expensive exercise, as millions of young Americans with massive student debt can testify, especially given that we’re graduating twice as many students from college every year as there are jobs requiring a college degree, and yet the mindless push for more students to go to college continues.

At the same time, we’re seeing a growing contempt for science, for verified facts, and for reasoned analysis of everything, while unthinking tribalism is running wild. All that suggests to me that, despite record high numbers of high school graduates and the proliferation of college degrees, the possession of credentials, and the mastery of the cellphone, Google, and objective tests, doesn’t help much with critical thinking, logical writing, or understanding and solving the problems facing the world.

Once upon a time, say sixty years ago, media news was largely about facts and an average reader or listener could usually figure out what was accurate and what was not. No, the news wasn’t perfect, and government hid information back then as well, but most media outlets devoted much more time and effort to digging up hard news, especially the facts. Today, all too many “news” outlets trumpet opinions second-hand and focus on sensationalist “exposes,” often about lesser matters.

It doesn’t really matter whether Hillary Clinton used a private server for some official emails. So did Colin Powell, and there’s no real evidence that either’s use compromised U.S. security. Hunter Biden tried to cash in on his father’s position. So did Billy Carter. Again, there’s no evidence that either President Carter or President Biden did anything wrong. Millions of Americans have greedy relatives. Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinski was deplorable and in terrible taste, but the fate of the free world didn’t exactly hang on a stained dress. So what else is new?

When thousands of people try to storm the U.S. Capitol and overturn an election that state officials from both parties declare was the fairest ever – that is a big deal. And so is a President inciting the mob or repeatedly committing tax fraud.

How did we get to a point where the facts and hard news take a back seat (or are often ignored) to unfounded lies and to those who trumpet them?

Largely because too many in the media have come to focus on what gets people excited and stirred up and how people feel. That drives ratings and profits, even for so-called “staid” and established media outlets such as The New York Times.

The other problem is that far too many media news outlets have focused on “fairness,” falsely equating objectivity to giving both sides equal time/airspace/column inches or the like. Today, the news continues to equate the fact that President Biden inadvertently had a few classified documents in his house and office with the hundreds of classified documents willfully taken and kept by former President Trump. The news media also gave up on noting Trump’s documented tens of thousands of lies and misstatements but scrutinizes Biden’s every statement for even minor inconsistencies.

In such cases, the news media are literally undermining their own objectivity, not that they seem to care that much, but objectivity isn’t measured or determined by equal time or by political beliefs; it’s established by verified facts – and by the lack of facts.

Opinions not backed by facts shouldn’t get equal time. Their shortcomings need to be exposed – factually – and the news needs to concentrate on what actually happened and how, instead of continually churning up the falsehoods and the liars who spout them.

Will this change? Only for the worse, I suspect, because Mammon is now the American God.