The Detroit News39%
Buss: Daylight savings time divides morning people and night owls 68%
By Kaitlyn Buss0% The Detroit News0%
7/17/2026, 9:00:27 PM
Topics: Daylight Saving Time, U S Politics
BS Summary: This article contains 30 faulty reasoning types, including Negativity Bias, Hasty Generalization, and Anecdotal, with Biased Writer Voice as the most egregious example at 23.8% saturation with 165 hits. Analysis detected 1,371 faulty-reasoning hits from 693 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 61.4% and a BS Rank of 68% (7,072 of 21,887 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 67.70% of the article peer group.
Every March and November, most Americans participate in one of the strangest rituals in modern life: turning the clocks forward or back an hour.
We abruptly lose one hour of sleep in the spring and pad ourselves an hour in the fall.
We're not buying ourselves more sunlight or more nighttime, but we certainly try to manipulate it.
There may have been good reasons in the past for such a system.
But today few would likely choose it, and now Congress — which can't agree on much — is trying to decide what time it really is.
A unique bipartisan coalition in the Republican-led U.S.
House on Tuesday approved the Sunshine Protection Act, which would make Daylight Savings Time permanent throughout the United States year-round.
Clocks would remain one hour ahead of standard time all year.
For Michigan, that would mean no "falling back" one hour in November and no "springing forward" next March.
Only 12% of U.S. adults favor the current system of daylight saving time, which has people in most states changing the clocks twice a year.
Forty-seven percent are opposed and 40% are neutral.
Michigan sits well in this debate.
Because it lies at the westward edge of the Eastern Time Zone, people here are already used to some extreme daylight patterns — particularly the farther north you go.
In Southeastern Michigan, the sun would rise around roughly 8 a.m. on Dec. 21 and set around 5 p.m.
Under the current system, June sunsets already stretch past 9 p.m., with sunrise arriving just before 6 a.m.
Can Michigan residents handle darker winter mornings?
That's a fair question.
Most other states will have a similar list of tradeoffs as they evaluate what works best for them.
Geography matters.
What feels reasonable in Michigan may not make sense in Florida, Maine or Arizona.
The proposal likely won't get through the Senate.
Republican Arkansas Sen.
Tom Cotton has already vowed to fight it, even though President Donald Trump supports it.
As with people here, most voters throughout the country are going to prefer whatever their geography tends toward.
Asking people to vote against their own preference for bedtime, school mornings or evening daylight may be one of the biggest non-starters in politics.
Still, the Senate should move forward with the proposal.
Eliminating the twice-yearly clock changes would likely reduce many of the health problems associated with them, including disrupted sleep, traffic accidents that increase modestly immediately after the spring change, heart attacks and some workplace injuries.
(Don't get a mom to young kids started on the stress of adjusting two times a year.)
Today, states can choose permanent standard time without congressional approval, but they can't independently adopt permanent daylight saving time.
The House bill would finally give them the opposite choice as well if they already qualify or act before the law is enacted.
Whether Michigan prefers lighter winter mornings or longer summer evenings is a decision that Michigan — not Washington — should make.
Living here for most of my life, I'm used to summer nights that never end (sometimes wishing they would) and morning rides to school in the freezing pitch black.
It does build character.
Changing what we're used to would bring its own challenges.
But if legislation standardizing time is going to move through, it should look like what the House passed this week.
This is one of those rare issues that doesn't neatly divide Americans into red and blue camps.
It divides them into morning people and night owls, parents and retirees, golfers and school bus drivers.
The coalitions are refreshingly random.
For once, Washington wasn't arguing about who won the last election or what should happen 30 years from now.
It was trying to solve one small, persistent annoyance that millions of Americans have complained about for generations.
In the end, Congress isn't really choosing a clock.
It's choosing whether to disappoint the people who love sunrise or the people who love sunset.
That's a tough call.
kbuss@detroitnews.com
This article originally appeared on The Detroit News: Buss: Daylight savings time divides morning people and night owls
Speakers
1speaker2.2%attributed speech678writer words
Voice mapSelect a segment to jump to its words
Selected voice
100%flagged-word coverageTom Cotton
15 attributed words100% of attributed speech89% writer coverage
Attribution is sentence-level. Pattern percentages are calculated only from words assigned to that voice.
Loading…
Loading…
Loading…
Analysis
Hover over highlighted words in the article to view the associated bias or fallacy analysis.