“Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.” – Benjamin Franklin

If President Trump and Congress want to be truly revolutionary, they should stop tinkering with healthcare and instead focus on a truly idiotic law that went into effect 50 years ago and got even worse in 2007.

Daylight Saving Time – which painfully kicks in this Sunday morning – is the ill-conceived product of something called the Uniform Time Act of 1966. In an effort to try to reduce late-day energy consumption, the United States pushed back the time for sunset during World War II. Afterwards, some states stuck to it while others didn’t. As confusion continued, Congress implemented a system for a national Daylight Saving Time – in which clocks would “spring forward” for an hour in late April and then “fall back” in October. During a 15-month period during the energy crisis of the mid 1970s, the United States stayed in Daylight Saving mode, ostensibly to save power.

But studies over the last 50 years have shown that there have been no real energy savings; the program is basically a zero-sum game. Homes that were getting light in the morning were suddenly plunged into early-morning darkness while children trudged to school in sun-free gloom. Meanwhile, studies show that worker productivity lags on that Monday in the spring when tens of millions of workers got one fewer hour of sleep over the weekend.

Rather than carefully examining the issue, Congress only made things worse with the Energy Policy Act of 2005. In a Homer Simpson-esque approach to getting Americans to consume less energy, lawmakers simply rolled back the start of Daylight Saving Time to early March. But in the ten years of the program’s March Madness, there have been no real findings that show that the switch from April to March led to an actual dip in energy consumption.

Meanwhile, millions of early risers who were savoring the slow arrival of spring are now annually kicked in the teeth. The sun is set to rise at 6:10 on Saturday morning in New York City and then suddenly leaps ahead to 7:08 on the next day. And for the record, we don’t get a 6:10 sunrise again until April 17th.

Where’s Ben Franklin when you need him?

 

 

Bob Hardt