Lawmakers in Salt Lake City recently approved giving the city’s NBA team, the Utah Jazz, $22.7 million in tax revenue collected from businesses in the basketball arena’s zoning district. The subsidy will be doled out over the next 25 years. The “reimbursement,” as lawmakers on the Redevelopment Agency of Salt Lake City termed the gift, is expected to be used to help pay for the planned construction and renovation of the Vivint Arena, where the Jazz play ball.

Under President Obama’s leadership, America has witnessed unusual, rather unexpected, serious clashes between citizens and authority. Tension between Blacks and the police has escalated, creating a racial divide most Americans believed had been healing. It seemed particularly odd that after the country had elected their first Black President, racial tensions would increase rather than decrease.

According to the United States Geological Survey, nearly half the land in the Western United States is owned by the federal government. This includes 84.9 percent of land in Nevada (hiding UFOs requires lots of space), 64.9 percent of Utah, 61.6 percent of Idaho, 61.2 percent of Alaska, 52.9 percent of Oregon, 48.1 percent of Wyoming, and 45.8 percent in California. Meanwhile, the federal government owns only about 5 percent of the land in states east of the Mississippi River. Altogether, Uncle Sam owns roughly 640 million acres of land.

In this edition of The Heartland Daily Podcast, managing editor Jesse Hathaway is joined by Tax Foundation policy analyst Jared Walczak. Walczak joins Hathaway to discuss the results of the 12th annual State Business Tax Climate Index report – A state-by-state, apples-to-apples comparison of states’ tax systems, the Climate Index helps Index helps lawmakers and taxpayers gauge how their states’ tax systems stack up against those in other states. Instead of just showing how much taxes each states collect from taxpayers, the Climate Index shows how well states’ tax collection systems are designed.

In today’s edition of the Heartland Daily Podcast, Managing Editor of Environment and Climate News H. Sterling Burnett talks with Randy Simmons. Simmons is a professor of economics at Utah State University. Simmons and Burnett discuss two studies he and his colleagues have done examining the economic impact Renewable Energy Mandates have had on the economies and people living in Kansas and North Carolina.

Residents of 11 Utah cities would be billed as much as $20 a month, as part of a plan to salvage the state’s once-heralded UTOPIA fiber optic network. UTOPIA, short…