Howzit Howard

On Statehood Day, thoughts about Hawaii ' s tourism future

It was my privilege to moderate a discussion of the next 50 years of Hawaii tourism as part of the Statehood Conference Friday at the Hawaii Convention Center. What was different about this panel was the youth of the panel. With the eldest member only 32 and the rest still in their twenties, they can expect to actually be around for 50 years, living with the results of decisions made now by them or their seniors. Micah Casey works at Ko Olina. Nicole Okuna is with the Sheraton Waikiki. Tal Ziv is vice president of ops for Sopogy. Virginia Steinbach is with Hilton Hawaiian Village. Laura Stevens works for the Department of Land & Natural Resources. Duke Wong is with the Moana Surfrider. Amber Watt works for Aqua Hotels & Resorts. Kainoa Daines is with Miramar. This was the panel. Daines, a Native Hawaiian graduate of the hotel management school at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, suggested that, beyond treating Hawaiian culture as a tourism draw and a great story to tell, we might consider actually consulting Hawaiian traditions for possible solutions to modern day problems. His understated way of proposing this, promising no panaceas, was thought-provoking. Stevens, who was active in the Nature Conservancy before going to work for DLNR, brought up the issues of poor park maintenance and the importance of removing invasive species where possible, a matter of importance for visitors and locals alike, and suggested this would be important over the next half century. Ziv, while acknowledging that some hotels have taken good strides toward clean, renewable energy, motivated by high water bills and lots of space for solar panels, suggested that as many hotels have failed to move down this road, and suggested that little will be done until someone at a hotel is actually in charge of doing this. Ziv also said economic diversification is necessary for sustainable tourism because we can't serve ever more visitors indefinitely, therefore we need our other economic engines to be stronger. In the audience, after calls for more locals in Waikiki, a lady from Starwood ran down an impressive list of kupuna demonstrating craft techniques that very day at the various Starwood properties in Waikiki, and said more locals should come see that sort of thing. I promised the room that if three rival hotels or chains would supply me with regular information on who would be demonstrating what, I would run a weekly item called "Waikiki for Locals." A surprise in the audience came from a woman who revealed she was a visitor from North Carolina who thought it would be interesting to crash the meeting. She said her hotel did a great job of telling her where to dine but seemed unable to direct her to places where she would meet ordinary local people. We agreed she should be directed to Ono's and the KCC Farmers Market and the swap meet at the stadium. I made a joke about cock fights but she said they have those in North Carolina, too. I'll make a few predictions for the next 50 years of Hawaii tourism:

• Waikiki will become a neighborhood of full-time condo residents who tolerate the oceanfront hotels but block any changes to real estate other than making new parks.
• The new Waikiki will be Wailea. In 50 years visiting Hawaii will mean visiting Maui unless you specify another island. A big component will be "health tourism" as spas push the envelope.
• The Chinese will not be a major market factor for at least 10 years, but 50 years from they will have supplanted the Japanese as the largest foreign component to our visitor trade.
• New B&Bs will be ghettoized or blocked altogether, creating a supply and demand issue that turns surviving B&Bs into premium destinations commanding premium rates. And they will be more about the food.
• After Oahu gets rail, Maui and the Big Island will design rail lines that will ease highway-widening pressure and create tourist attractions. Visitors will ride, but trolleys won't go everywhere and they will still rent cars.

Music post: music, the motion, the ocean

The ending of Bedrich Smetana's "Vltava," better known on this side of the pond as "The Moldau," includes a rising and falling figuration that feels like waves, and I've wanted for some time to play it, then play "Walk in the Black Forest," a 1960s instrumental piece by Horst Jankowski's band that uses the same lick. Then I puckishly chose to lead into this with Michael Nyman's "Fish Beach" and Frank Zappa's "Outrage at Valdez," and fill out the half hour with "The River" from Grofe's "Hudson River Suite." From there it was a few simple strokes, including Wagner's "Flying Dutchman" and the first bouree from Handel's "Water Music" and Mendelssohn's "Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage" and Frederic Delius' "Summer Night on the River" and Debussy's "Dialogue to the Wind and the Sea" from "La mer" and "The Battle" from the soundtrack to "Master & Commander" and George Martin's "Sea of Holes" from "Yellow Submarine," and suddenly I had an entirely wet edition of "Howard's Day Off." What is it that inspires composers to make music about water so often? Because this is a mere sample. The show will also include "Wandering by the Brook" and "At the Waterfall" from Richard Strauss' "Alpine Symphony," Anatol Lyadov's "Enchanted Lakes," and Percy Grainger's setting of the folk song "Spoon River." I will also include Paul Dukas' "Sorcerer's Apprentice," which of course depicts a broomstick bringing pails of water, one after another, until the sorcerer's cave floods, and "Aquariums" from Camille Saint-Saens' "Carnival of the Animals." Not appearing on the program is Duke Ellington's "The River" or the "Ocean Symphony" of Nicolai Rubinstein, which in the late 1800s was the single most often programming work on symphonic programs. "Howard's Day Off" is aired live, 5 a.m.-7 a.m. HST Saturdays on Hawaii Public Radio, and is streamed online at www.hawaiipublicradio.org. Max Cacas of Washington, D.C., created the "Howard's Day Off Appreciation Society" on Facebook.

Facing up to certain things about Facebook

What is a friend? On Facebook, I have 1,000 friends. But I wouldn't try to borrow money from 990 of them. On Facebook, a "friend" can be a family member, a viewer, someone I worked with 20 years ago, or a realtor who uses Facebook for networking. A Facebook friend can even be a non-sentient entity. One of my "friends" is a garage on a neighbor island. You can make a new friend by accepting his/hers/its request to become one. Or you can ask for the connection, becoming a friend if the other party approves it. Facebook friends can also send you a note suggesting that you might like to become a friend of some third person. I came late to Facebook, joining it right after returning home from my hospitalization in March. I did it after reading that Facebook used more bandwidth than the entire Internet had required just a few years earlier. It was growing so fast it was replacing MySpace as THE place to be in cyberspace. I decided to jump in and see what was going on. It turned out to be a nice way to communicate with viewers. So many people in Hawaii are super-busy in the morning getting ready for work, getting kids ready for school, trying to squeeze some exercise or spam-deletion before going to the office, it's nice to send a note telling what they'll hear about if they can spare a moment to turn the TV on. Actual friends resurfaced from my past, and that was pleasant, too. Some friends and acquaintances do just the right amount of posting on their lives, with occasional photos, and it's fun to follow them. But I quickly learned, as many new arrivals to Facebook do, that the site is replete with ways to take over your life, Dungeons and Dragons style, if you let it happen. Virtual hugs, snowballs, pokes and treats constitute contact strokes without content; other features amount to low-tech video games; hours can be spent in these functions, yet they don't really provide any stimulating social interaction at all. You can spend a lot of time just becoming an official Facebook "fan" of people and products, creating a link to their/its Facebook page on your own. Since people can send you suggestions to become fans of this and that, this burns up more time. You get invitations to attend events and declare that you will. If I participated in all of this I would spend at least an hour a day on Facebook. I hit "ignore" on these functions without reading them because I already spend two hours online in the late afternoon and I refuse to sit in that chair a minute longer. If you pinged me on something and I failed to endorse it, this is why. Two events this week made me think about all this. Most of my friends asked to be friends, and I accepted them. I've rarely rejected anyone unless it's an obvious networking move by someone I never heard of, though I did retract my friendship with a public relations person who had begun sending me almost daily recommendations that I become Facebook fans of one client after another. But the other day, an acquaintance recommended a third person as a friend, and I thought maybe the third person had mentioned being a viewer, so I went ahead as requested the connection. She emailed me saying she was new to Facebook and didn't understand why I was asking to be her friend. I wrote back, explaining what you read here, and told her if she meant to use Facebook only for real friends she should ignore my contact and no harm done. She wrote back, thanked me for the explanation, and turned down my friend request. I actually felt a pang of rejection before recalling that this was precisely what I recommended she do! OfficeTeam reported this week that it surveyed randomly-selected senior executives at the nation's biggest corporations and most said they feel uncomfortable with the idea of being befriended on Facebook by subordinates OR their boss. They also didn't like having vendors try to make them Facebook friends. Facebook is a pretty good party line, but clearly not everyone wants to be a party to it.

Do you walk in circles when lost?

German psychologists have gathered the first scientific evidence that humans, when lost, tend to wander in the circles. The Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics tracked lost people with GPS. They did it in the desert and they did it in a forest. The results were the same. According to finding in the publication Current Biology, lost people were followed for hours. The moment they couldn't see the Sun or the Moon, they began walking in circles. Okay. Why is this? What do you think? My first reaction was, we lack confidence in our forward direction, so we instinctively stay close to a starting point rather than risk walking decisively away from our goal. I was surprised to read that until now, the most common thinking in the scientific community was that people have a natural tendency to walk in an arc because most of us have one leg shorter than another. But in this study the researchers could not find a correlation, so they're leaning more toward my theory. They said one person sometimes circles to the left and sometimes to the right.

A personal history of employment upheaval

When I invited suggestions for a topic for my 700th blog post, one reader thought I might describe some lessons learned in my past employment history, since so many of us are in job turmoil these days. The state contract talks commanded attention for post 700, but here we go, in 701. My first job was as a clerk in the Maryland State Employment Office in Baltimore. After leading the class in a typing class - I am a very fast, very accurate two-fingered typist - I was hired as a Clerk Typist II and immediately assigned to a summer job in which I never so much as saw a typewriter. My job was to check the computer punchcards sent back by unemployed people and see if they had listed at least three places contacted to see if they had work. If they did, they got their check. If they didn't, they were called in for an interview. No one doublechecked the entries. I remember there was a denim clothing factory that alternated between two work forces so that one work force was off for two or three weeks at a time, collecting unemployment, while the other was on the job. I was informed that this was technically legal. Maybe it isn't any more. My second job was working for free at a small radio station. I offered to do high school news in return for training for the first part-time disc jockey opening. They soon had me ripping and reading the news wire - I once read "indicted" as if it rhymed with "conflicted" but otherwise did okay. But the station needed an affirmative action policy, and when the first part-time disc jockey opening occurred, it hired an African American gentleman with even less experience than I had, which is to say none, and paid him during training. Focusing less on my opportunity to do my bit for civil rights and more on the broken promise to me, I quit my (unpaid) job in a huff. The black guy, by the way, became quite a good disc jockey and moved to a bigger station in Washington where I enjoyed listening to him. I worked for 7-Eleven for awhile. It was a lot like working at a radio station, with a single underpaid, underage person surrounded by a semi-circle of equipment. While in community college, which I would later abandon in order to get my own education, I began working for actual money, if not a lot of it, at a second radio station. It was a full-time offer from this station that prompted me to cut the cord with college. The general manager, Kerby Confer, who now owns his own chain of stations, was a former disc jockey who still found radio exciting and conveyed that joy to me. That summer I worked Monday-Friday at a Kaiser Aluminum factory, performing a variety of indescribably filthy and dangerous tasks amid a painful din of equipment for really good money, then worked Saturday-Sunday doing news on a rock station. Happiest summer of my life. A teenager working for a rock station gets to date a lot of beautiful listeners. That station was sold to a new owner who felt the station had too big a news department, and out the door I went. A couple weeks later I was anchoring news on an all-news station in Washington, D.C., the third-rated of three all-news stations, I might add. The pay was so poor that one winter I couldn't afford to get my car fixed and walked to work on Key Bridge across the Potomac River to Rosslyn, Va., where the studios were. I grew my beard to stay warm. At this station I learned a lot about doing news on-the-cheap, including reading newspaper copy live, inverting sentences to put the dangling attribution first, because there wasn't enough time to edit or rewrite anything. A couple years later that station was sold to a new owner who switched to a music format and let the entire staff go. I freelanced for a few months for both AP Radio and the Mutual Broadcasting System until Mutual came through with a staff position as anchor, but on the condition that I quit AP Radio without notice. After failing to persuade them to let me at least give them two weeks notice, I took it rather than leave it, burned my bridges at AP Radio, worked a single day as a newscaster, and was informed by the news director at the end of the day that the president of the network had unexpectedly failed to approve my hire ("Don't hire anybody else from Washington," he said.) Too eager for a staff position to sue or grieve, I accepted a consolation price, a tape editor job that paid a fraction of the anchor salary, along with a continuation of the weekend anchoring I had been doing freelance. In a couple years I was forcibly promoted into management by a really nasty boss who knew I wanted to do air work full-time and snuffed that dream by telling me I didn't have the voice for network radio. Seven years after I joined Mutual, the management wiped out 50 positions including mine. A month later the nasty boss was out, too, but I was still on the street myself. My confidence was restored by someone who told me that the same guy, while in New York, had also told Charles Osgood and Ted Koppel that they didn't have voices for network radio, either. So I applied at UPI Radio and was hired as one of their morning newscasters. I will always be grateful to Jim Bohannon, the radio talk show host, who knew my work and gave a recommendation that got their attention, and his ex-wife Camille Bohannon, who already worked at UPI, helped me learn the ropes. UPI was a troubled company, and by "troubled" I mean "hopelessly screwed up," but it was a wonderful place for any journalist who loves the underdog. I got to write humor columns there, review CDs and books, and anchor two presidential inaugurations live. I would stay at UPI for 13 years, getting a series of battlefield promotions as the company shrank. The last couple years I ran the global wire service, first with a colleague and friend, and then alone. But by then I had promised my wife Marilyn we could move to Hawaii as soon as she retired from her job in Washington, and I needed to go back into local radio to be ready for that. One day the latest in a series of CEOs hired to turn UPI around who didn't, called me into his office wearing a chef's uniform, complete with big hat (it was Halloween) and told me he had hired an executive from outside the company to turn it around and I could be her assistant or take any number of other positions. I decided to quit instead, and did, the following Monday. The same week I got a job with an all-news station in Washington, this time one with excellent ratings. Jim Farley, who ran NBC Radio's famous News & Information Service, was doing the hiring, and basically told me he was taking me on because of what he had heard about me. I will never forget that moment, realizing that on reputation alone I was being hired before my feet could hit the ground. What a glorious feeling that was. Now I was back in all-news radio, a format I really enjoyed, but as a grown-up, making a living wage. It was wonderful preparation for moving to Hawaii. I worked for WTOP for three years. When the time came to move, Marilyn got a post at TheBus and I signed on with Pacific Business News, the first time in my career I had ever focused on business news, though during the years at Mutual I had specialized in interviewing economists on economic stories - up-and-coming guys like Alan Greenspan! -and at UPI I filed daily economic reports that were routinely carried by NPR, which is why public radio listeners in Hawaii are sometimes surprised to hear that I did not move to Hawaii until the end of 2000: they heard me on HPR much earlier than that. Well, there's a taste of a career. Television? That didn't happen until 2002....

State employees and the retirement option

A glimmer of light shone on the often murky state employee contract talks Wednesday, when HGEA said, and the governor implicitly confirmed, that the two sides have been informally discussing the possibility of early retirements to partially close the budget gap. The union said that in a typically year about 500 state employees retire, but this year it looks like more than 2,200 will do so, including many who have been targeted for layoff or who fear losing their jobs through bumping by others targeted for layoff who have more seniority than they do. HGEA says enough early retirements could obviate the need for layoffs. Gov. Lingle says she can't base a labor contract on estimates. Fair enough. But four times the usual number of retirees will certainly help, and it's a bit more dignified than being laid off. I may not be reading this right, but I get the impression that the unions, which were initially warm to the idea of rolling furloughs provided they were negotiated, are stalling in the hope that the economy will improve, and with it, tax revenues. (It's what I would do.) And the governor is standing firm because she dare not simply assume things will get better, and opportunities to downsize government even incrementally are not to be missed. (Again, if it were me, I'd leverage the crisis to trim things a bit.) If you work for the state as a secretary, are you aware that secretaries have virtually ceased to exist in the private sector? And that this happened more than 20 years ago in most companies? This crisis should be a wake-up call for anyone who has a job that is obsolete in the real world. It is heartening to hear that the two sides are talking informally almost every day, even as they pursue their court options, because this suggests they can reach agreement quickly once they feel they must. But there may be more posturing and wrangling before that pass is reached.

When CSI meets Law & Order: the KGMB-KHNL merger

In the movie "Citizen Kane," the central figure, a young man who has suddenly become rich, astonishes his financial advisors by choosing not to sell a newspaper that loses money. "I think," he says, "it would be fun to run a newspaper." A surprising number of people who own large radio and television broadcasting groups are former broadcasters themselves who find it enjoyable to be in this particular business. For some of them, no matter how deeply they get into leveraged buyouts and milking economies of scale to get the money for the payments for the loans that bought the stations to begin with, there is always that spark of love-of-broadcasting, sometimes even the hope that they can manage to succeed in such a way that their employees can enjoy broadcasting as much as they did. I sense some of that in the creative way that the owners of KGMB and KHNL worked out a merger of news operations that will save more jobs than might have been lost had they not concocted this plan. It is also true that owners of broadcast groups love to own properties in Hawaii, because then they get to fly out and check on it from time to time. But this, unfortunately, has led to Hawaii having a surfeit of media. This is good for you, the consumer of news, when all the news organizations can make a living. The more voices the better. But sometimes it simply leads to an ample supply of lean news, as those organizations strip themselves bare to survive advertising rate wars and recessions. The merger of the KGMB and KHNL newsrooms will use the KHNL physical plant, which is newer, and KGMB's general manager, who has presided over the most dramatic ascent in ratings the market has ever seen. The plan is to draw the best people from both operations. It is easier to say that now, before we know who stays and who goes. Such a matter is of necessity partly subjective. Maybe when we know who will be laid off, I will be very sad to see that we did not keep person X. I will try to keep in mind when that happens that the alternative to this very probably was the eventual shutdown of one of the state's TV news operations altogether, with greater job loss than this. More voices is better. But journalism doesn't come from the news fairy. It costs money, and the money comes from ad revenues. Absent that revenue in sufficient quantities to support four news operations, it is better to have three. Otherwise you have four operations struggling to get on the air, without the necessary resources to do the news coverage that you wanted more voices for in the first place. I note that the general manager of KITV vows to compete aggressively with the new combine while the general manager of KHON says he may hire some who don't make the cut. The deal could galvanize the other competition, always a good thing. The deal is complicated and interesting. From a legal point of view, the owners of KGMB and the owners of KHNL/K5 will remain so. But KGMB and K5 programming will swap. Even the call letters will swap. This has the practical effect of swapping out owners. The company that owns KGMB will find itself the owner of the same station but airing K5 programming. Raycom, owner of KHNL, will then also own the station that runs KGMB programming. This appears to eliminate the need for license transfer approval by the Federal Communications Commission. All three stations will operate out of the KHNL facilities on Waiakamilo Rd., leaving the aging KGMB physical plant to be demolished one day and the land repurposed for something that makes more sense in the urban environment that the Kapiolani Blvd. corridor has become. BTW, the CBS station will still run the CBS programming and the NBC station will still run the NBC programming. Hmm. It just occurs to me, if I make the team, my commute will get longer. Postscript: It's worth mentioning that this kind of thing has been going on in radio for years. When I broke into radio in my senior year in high school in 1970, federal law barred owning more than 5 television stations, 5 FM stations and 7 AM stations, and you could not own more than one of each in a given city. Furthermore, every station had to do some news. When these rules were relaxed, investors began amassing many radio stations in one city. These acquisitions were mostly bought with borrowed money, then the payments on the loans were made by slashing costs. Five stations in one city, each with its own chief engineer, production manager, and traffic manager (the person who produces the logs telling when to run which commercials), could be merged into a single operation with just one of each. (Note: The next post on this blog will be post #700. That's right: 700 posts since launching on Sept. 17, 2007, the same day "Sunrise" launched. What would you like the 700th post to be about? HMD)

How much longer will this recession run, anyway?

Yes, we're all tired of it, this lengthy economic downturn, so severe that even in Hawaii it has been a pain, though it's so much milder here than in California. How much longer already? When will the arrows turn the other direction for a change? Actually, the answer might be, soon. But with asterisks. Asterisk number one: the recovery will be slow, possibly taking years, an interregnum in which the arrows will be pointing upward but conditions will be nothing like the last period of prosperity. And don't forget what I told you about unemployment: it's a lagging indicator and might keep getting worse for months after the overall economy stops shrinking. Keeping in mind the joking definition - if your neighbor is out of work, it's a recession; if you're out of work, it's a depression - you may not fully appreciate a slow rebound if, during its first several months, you're still unemployed or know people who are. Asterisk number two: some economists fear this could be a so-called double-dip recession, in which things improve for awhile but then, if the credit markets don't normalize, we sink back into economic shrinkage again. Having done my duty by repeating those depressing points, however, I feel free to tell you that there is every possibility that the actual recession, the actual shrinking of the U.S. economy in general and Hawaii's economy especially, will end by Christmas, as consumers regain some of their confidence and lenders regain some of their nerve. There was an article in the newspaper in which a housing industry expert predicted a further decline in Hawaii housing prices, based on second quarter data that his company just number-crunched. But we're halfway through the third quarter already and prices seem to have bottomed out across much of the state. For July they were sharply down again on Maui, but sales volume was down only 5% from year-ago levels on Kauai, and sales volume was UP from last year on Oahu and the Big Island. Weekly jobless claims, which mounted scarily in May and June, kind of leveled off in July, though at a high level. It's too soon to call it a trend, but I'm just telling you this is another conditional sign that we've may have seen the worst by now. To see when things actually will bottom out, watch fuel prices, because soaring crude can screw up everything again, and look for any promising sign of banks lending again. And watch labor negotiations, especially the ones with the state, where some outcomes could make things a lot worse.

Hawaiian prepares to spread its wings

On the eve of mediated Washington, D.C., contract talks with its pilots, Hawaiian Airlines announced that it has been hiring a lot of people - more than 100 in recent months - and wants to hire more than 50 more pilots and flight attendants in preparation for expansion when the first Airbus A-330 jets begin arriving next year. The Air Line Pilots Association has been saying that Hawaiian is resisting fair wage increases for pilots while handing out cash in shareholder profits and executive pay, and the airline may have chosen this moment to update its expansion plans by way of reminding all and sundry that it is investing money in the airline's future. "You have to grow to survive," Hawaiian Airlines CEO Mark Dunkerley told me once, and I remember thinking at the time that it didn't sound like a casual comment he picked up somewhere but a devoutly held view of things. Leasing new aircraft means reducing the kerosene bill. The new generation of jets, from both Airbus and Boeing, are less thirsty than older planes. Let's not forget that most airlines today spend more for jet fuel than for payroll. And the Defense Department announced Monday that its new annual contract for aviation fuel from Tesoro Hawaii was worth $187 million. But there's more to the new Airbus jets than thrift. The Airbus A330 can fly more than 6,000 nautical miles on a tank of gas. This opens up a new range of possible nonstop destinations for Hawaiian, including cities deep within China and cities on the Atlantic Coast of the U.S. mainland. The possibilities are endless:

• Hawaiian could cultivate visitors from Albuquerque or Kansas City or St. Louis or New Orleans.
• It could do what United has never roused itself to do, offer nonstop service here from Washington, D.C.
• In the right economic conditions, traffic might support service from Mexico City.
• Hawaiian could try secondary markets in Japan that JAL and ANA does serve directly.
• Mainland China has lots of huge cities. Shanghai is even bigger than Beijing.
• Singapore and Hong Kong haven't been conveniently connected to Honolulu since Cathay Pacific got jets that didn't need to stop here to refuel.
• We keep saying what a huge source of tourists China will be. What about India, which has its own large population of English-speaking affluent travelers?

In other airline news, the head of the in-house pilots union at Southwest Airlines has indicated to his members that Republic Airways, parent company of Mokulele Airlines, successfully won a deal to acquire Denver-based Frontier Air because the head of Southwest insisted that pilot seniority lists be equitably merged before any deal was consummated. Merging pilot seniority lists is worse than herding cats. US Airways and America West merged corporately years ago and still haven't quite managed this. American Airlines acquired TWA and years later, when its closed the old TWA hub in St. Louis, never had entirely solved the integration of pilot seniority to everyone's satisfaction. Republic gets around it by operating its regions as discrete entities. It doesn't even try to merge the pilot lists.

Layoff notices a wake up call to lawmakers

Did you think the governor issued layoff notices to impel the unions to more readily agree to the more sensible alternative of furloughs? Because if the layoff notices are lighting a fire under anybody, it seems to be state legislators. The unions are still moving with deliberation, possibly hoping that the economy will stop getting worse, tax revenue will increase, and a smaller concessionary delta will be the focus of negotiations after that. Lawmakers, on the other hand, now that they can see what specific jobs are for the chop, are concerned about the state services set to be screwed up as an inevitable consequence of having no more dough to fund them. The selection of jobs to reduce does not show any obvious sign that anyone deliberately sought to create as much pain as possible, to hold their breath until you turn blue. To the contrary, they're spread out among many departments, and the other departments that seem mostly spared are those with a lot of non-union employees who are being put on the furlough program instead, the judge's order not having impeded that with workers who aren't subject to collective bargaining. But the layoffs still include agriculture inspectors, nurses and other people who come nowhere close to the slow-moving, never-heard-of-customer-service, surly bureaucrats that many people fantasized would be sent packing in a round of layoffs. Heavens! Agriculture inspectors and nurses! They do actual work! Within hours of issuance of the list detailing the positions being cut, several lawmakers had gone on record saying this won't do. Some who wield budget power even claimed the jobs could not be eliminated without their say-so, while the agriculture cuts produced an immediate constituency for taking action among lawmakers from neighbor islands, especially the Big Island. As I reported a couple of weeks ago, the state ag department stands to lose inspectors who are a necessary part of the process of exporting Hawaii farm goods to other countries. The fear is that perishable goods will, uh, perish, before they can reach their markets. Which brings us back the elephant in the room - the option of a temporary, further increase in the general excise tax to raise revenue to cover state payrolls until times get better. The general excise tax is applied to so many things, virtually all goods and services, every time something changes hands, so that it actually appies several times to some goods, that weeny-sounding increase would bring in a pile of money, and we are still hearing state union officials bring this up from time to time as an "easy" option to settle the matter and preserve jobs and the above-average raises that state workers have gotten over recent years. The unions know that Democratic legislators with cordial relations with the unions are sufficiently numerous to enact and shove it down the governor's throat, also making life easier for the governor, yet because she vetoes it first she can still say she opposed it. How nice this sounds to those facing wage concessions. But it only sounds nice if you imagine it the way I just did, without any reference to the economic ill-effects of a tax hike that touches every financial transaction in the state at a time of a slow and fragile recovery that is not yet even begun. Taxes are a great weight on employers already, and for recovery we really need employers to start hiring again. Employment is a lagging economic indicator, which means that when a recession ends, joblessness keeps getting worse for months, sometimes a year, and a recovery never really gets serious until hiring resumes. And you get much more general excise tax income from employed persons spending their earnings than you do by adding a few links to the chains hanging from the shoulders of business. This isn't a debatable philosophical point. It's how things work. To get more tax revenue, especially in a state that gets most of it by taxing expenditures of both businesses and consumers, you need more employed consumers and more businesses that feel they can afford to spend. That will bring in more revenue and no lawmaker will have to explain why he voted to raise taxes.