Daylight Savings Time Sucks!

And John Miller explains it well, it's history and why it really does Suck.

Like a lot of hardworking Americans, I often complain that there aren't enough hours in the day. That's why I dread what happens this weekend, when we're all supposed to "spring forward" between sundown on Saturday and sunup on Sunday.

I want my hour back!

I know, I know: It will be returned to me later this year, when we "fall back" on the weekend of October 29-30. But here at NRO, we're all about standing athwart history yelling "stop!" This Daylight Saving scheme, in contrast, demands that we holler "faster!" or "reverse!"

The reason we have Daylight Saving Time (DST), of course, is because the politicians have mandated it. Washington is much better at wasting things than saving them, but federal lawmakers nevertheless spent much of the 20th century insisting, with typical modesty, that they could "save daylight." (Why couldn't they instead have tried to save Social Security?)

Congress passed the first DST law in 1918 and repealed it the next year. Franklin Delano Roosevelt imposed year-round DST for three years during the Second World War. In 1966, Congress approved a uniform DST standard for the whole country. In the 1970s, Richard Nixon had the nation go on DST for 15 consecutive months in order to conserve energy. The last president to modify DST was Ronald Reagan, who advanced DST's start date to the first Sunday in April.

I recently wondered exactly why we observe Daylight Saving Time (DST). For some reason, I had harbored a vague notion that it had to do with farmers.

Read all of John's column because he does make a great case for why it sucks and why it was stupid to begin with.


Mr Minority