Over the last few years, the drumbeat has gotten louder for the United States to abandon the time change and stick with one time year-round. Most folks like the idea of longer evenings and Daylight Saving Time year-round. Yet the more I look at the concept of Daylight Saving Time for the entire year, the less I like it.

Why? In our neck of the woods, using Sedalia sunrise and sunset times as an example, not changing the clock back an hour on the first weekend in November would mean sunrise at 8:00 AM on November 19 and sunset at 5:56 PM. Granted, I'd love sunset at 5:56 PM, but not seeing the sun until 8:00 AM is rough.

Our latest sunrises would occur from December 28 through January 13, with a few days at the beginning of January clocking in at 8:31 AM for our sunrise. That said, we'd hit a 6:00 PM sunset on December 30.

Conversely, not "springing forward" in March and staying on Standard Time, Sedalia would see a sunrise of 4:48 AM on July 20, the longest day of the year, and a sunset of 7:40 PM. That sunrise is really early and a waste of the sun we could have in the evening.

I don't know if our lawmakers will ever get it together enough to stop moving the clocks back every fall and forward every spring. Research shows that it's stressful for our health. Yet my research on what year-round Daylight Saving Time or year-round Standard Time would look like makes me think there's no way to make everyone all across America happy by picking a time and sticking with it. And politicians hate that.

Additionally, the last time year-round Daylight Saving Time was tried, it didn't work out well. It was 1974, the middle of the energy crisis, and year-round Daylight Saving Time was implemented in January of that year. The Washington Post cites polling by NORC at the University of Chicago, saying 79% of Americans favored the change.  By August of 1974, NORC noted only 42% of Americans supported the change. After President Ford signed a bill doing away with year-round Daylight Saving Time that October, everyone turned their clocks back to Standard Time.

David Prerau studied the issue for the U.S. Department of Transportation and then wrote a book about it. He asserts to The Washington Post that people liked not changing their clocks but didn't think, "Oh, I’m going to have four months of dark mornings. I think that’s what happened in ’74. People didn’t think about that.”

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At the end of the Post article, Prerau points out that daylight and darkness are the same as in 1974. Frankly, many of the things folks hated about year-round Daylight Saving Time in 1974, whether it's kids walking to school in the dark or people walking into their offices before the sun rises, won't be any different today.

That makes me think we will fall back and spring forward for many years. Here in Missouri, doing that isn't too bad.

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