Every citizen ' s duty: understand the crisis

Hawaii state tax revenues are now down almost a third from what they were in the good times that came before this recession. Did you know that? I'm running into a lot of people who have strong opinions about the players in this crisis but don't know that. It seems to be easier to blame the crisis on someone's incompetence, venality or some other evil trait, than to actually read up on the crisis and try to understand it. If this persists as the shallow view of the emergency on the part of a majority of the electorate, it will almost certainly lead to solutions that aren't the best. The best behavior, I suspect, would be to avoid attacking the players - the legislature, the governor, the unions, the employees, the business community - and focus on the math. Because people who don't bother to understand the math are coming with "solutions" that are nothing of the sort, there being insufficient funds for them. Perhaps it would be helpful to again try to dispel some myths about bad behavior by the key figures in the crisis:

• Governor Lingle began cutting spending on her own a year and a half ago, and took a voluntary pay cut at the beginning of 2009. I still get email from people wondering why the governor's pay isn't cut. It was.
• The legislature, after getting an official estimate from the Council on Revenues on how much tax revenue to expect in the current fiscal year, passed a smaller budget than that amount. Revenues then fell even more. The legislature actually tried to be frugal.
• Union leaders have demanded more for their members than there is money to pay for, but it is their job to pursue the best deal for their members, not to roll over and play dead.
• The business community, currently opposing any tax increases, has tried to minimize layoffs, with many operating at a loss until better times. But many have gone out of business altogether in this crisis.

The economy will start to improve minimally in 2010, most economists think, but county governments, whose property tax revenues lag actual recession by a year due to the reassessment process, will have the sort of crisis in 2010 that the state government is having now. This isn't over. One of the newspapers had a headline that said "Teachers want..." in reporting the teacher's union demand that the state not simply wipe out in-service days to cover Furlough Fridays. One union official said he was waiting to see if the state government was committed to education. The grammar of the headline, and of the union leader's comment, require comment. A demand by the teacher's union does not automatically mean a demand by teachers. Union negotiations always start with demands for more than will finally be agreed to. What teachers want and what their representatives initially ask for should not automatically be considered synonymous. Second, a commitment to education does not automatically equal more money for teachers. To argue otherwise is another form of Napoleon's "L'etat, c'est moi" or the old "What's good for General Motors is good for the USA." This is always the case, but especially in a fiscal crisis where there simply is not enough money. Any teacher who thinks this crisis can be resolved without some pain is not a good student of the crisis. No one benefits from this emergency. Government workers can take no comfort at all except from the fact that in many parts of the private sector it is worse.

Comments

[Lavasusan]

"What teachers want and what their representatives initially ask for should automatically be considered synonymous."

Did you mean "not" synonymous? Otherwise, I'm having trouble following your chain of thought.

[You're right. I'll go back and fix it. HMD]

[Dirk Wasano]

The biggest problem is the biggest employer in Hawaii is the government. In the 60s and 70s at least we had sugar and pineapple. We use to provide 40% of the world's sugar and pineapple. (the world's, not only the nation's) I’m not saying we should plant another crop, but we do have so much potential to develop another industry, if people would only open their eyes and use a little imagination.
What could be the biggest industry for Hawaii is based on water. Where do you think the Hydrogen must come from in the hydrogen fuel cell has to comes from? If not from water, then we will risk losing all life on earth. Ok, so the technology is not there yet. We still could make an industry of desalinizing sea water. Mining or extracting elements from sea water. Magnesium is one of the easiest thing we could be extracting, not to mention salt, iron, gold, and all of elements under the sun.
I mean we could have missed the boat, when President Bush had his Hydrogen fuel cell initiative.
How about the Molokai Sea Mining Company or Big Island Big Water? While everybody is worry about, “how do we get the world to shop here?”, when we should be asking “what other thing can we develop for the world?”