Doubling Down on Time Jiggering

by Paul Jacob: Daylight Saving Time was designed to trick us into spending more free time in daylight during summer. The trick? Set our clocks forward in the spring, meaning — if we keep to our old-clocked schedules — waking up and going to work earlier, leaving more recreational and home life (and shopping time) in sunnier late afternoons and evenings.

Kind of cheating. Surely we cam change our schedule to fit whatever
sunlight we want and we don't need Washington to tell
us when to get up ... even as they manipulate time.
Most folks find it a bother.* Switching one’s clocks back and forth means upsetting sleep rhythms, which can trigger negative health outcomes.

Commonsensical people prefer to chuck the program — and several states have opted out, having no Daylight Saving Time at all. The program’s benefits — and negatives — often prove hard to find in actual statistics.

Enter Senators Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.). They want to get rid of all the Spring-Forward/Fall-Back nonsense.

And there’s a bill in the House to push the policy forward.

But they want to do it the Nixonian way, making Daylight Savings Time universal and year-long. This effectively shifts time zones permanently east by one hour. And ensures that no one will experience 12:00 at solar noon, with the Sun directly above.

Surely we can change our schedules to fit whatever sunlight we want and we don’t need Washington to tell us when to get up . . . even as they manipulate time.

Regardless, you can check out Murray’s and Rubio’s arguments in USA Today.

The switching has got to go. But the permanent evasion of astronomical timekeeping sure smacks of . . . the opposite of . . .

Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 
* Daylight Savings Time was first instituted in wartime by Woodrow Wilson, but repealed by popular demand during peacetime; this was repeated under FDR for WWII. Richard M. Nixon pushed it in during the Seventies as an energy conservation program. It still exists federally, with 16 state exceptions.
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Paul Jacob (@Common_Sense_PJ) is author of Common Sense which provides daily commentary about the issues impacting America and about the citizens who are doing something about them. He is also President of the Liberty Initiative Fund (LIFe) as well as Citizens in Charge Foundation. Jacob is a contributing author on the ARRA News Service.

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