Some thirty plus years ago, when most of my children were out of the house, my then-wife and I looked into selling the five plus bedroom house in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., because the stress of my high-paying, higher-stress consulting job had literally landed me in the hospital, and we were hoping that a smaller dwelling with less maintenance would allow me to become a full-time writer.

It wasn’t possible. Housing prices had risen so fast that smaller decent houses were selling for almost as much as our larger dwelling would fetch, and a lower income couldn’t finance them. In the end, that was a great part of the reason we moved to New Hampshire.

I’ve recently discovered the same problem is recuring for several relatives, although the mechanics are slightly different, this time because of the concurrence of a change in the tax treatment of selling residences and the even higher rises in housing in a number of urban areas.

What happens when an older single widow or widower [that doesn’t apply to us, thankfully] or divorced individual has a house too big to handle, in which there’s a substantial amount of increased equity because of spiking real estate prices, and wants to downsize? In a number of suburban areas, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to downsize without huge penalties.

And for single parent families, the situation can be even worse. One professional woman bought a house ten years ago for $500,000, with a mortgage of $350,000. She had a solid income from her own business, but COVID effectively destroyed 80% of her income from her business. She’d like to sell the house and buy something smaller for her and her child because her income won’t cover the current mortgage payment on the house. The house will likely fetch slightly over a million dollars. But if she sells the house, she’ll realize a capital gain of $500,000, half of which is taxable, with a capital gains tax of roughly $40,000, and sales costs of $75,000 leaving her with approximately $525,000, which sounds like a lot, except even a 1,200-1,400 square foot townhouse anywhere within 20 miles will cost $700,000, and her income isn’t high enough to qualify for a mortgage to make up the difference. So she can’t afford to buy a house half the size of the one she owns, which she can no longer afford, and she has to pay capital gains tax when the “gain” in value is effectively illusory.

This situation can be even worse in places like Los Angeles, where 1,100 square foot former “tract” homes in many areas, not even high status locations, sell for over a million dollars, which is why so many former Californians are moving to Cedar City and elsewhere in Utah, where they’re driving up housing prices here.

And all the time, the government is collecting taxes on illusory capital gains.

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.