Hawaii attorney and campaign strategist Andy Winer is heading off to Washington, according to an email announcement yesterday. Winer wrote:
Earlier today, I accepted an offer to serve in the Obama Administration as the Director of External Affairs at NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration). In that role, I will be involved in helping to develop communication/political strategies on behalf of NOAA with business groups, environmental groups, state/local governments, and Indian tribes on issues including climate change, fisheries management, and ocean ecology.
Winer has become a familiar face in island politics as director the Obama campaign in Hawaii. He also managed Senator Dan Akaka’s 2006 reelection campaign as well as Duke Bainum’s 2004 mayoral campaign.
In June 22 letters to Senate President Colleen Hanabusa and House Speaker Calvin Say, Board of Education Chairman Garrett Toguchi quoted testimony by a group of 120 economists advising the State of New York on the issue of why tax increases are economically preferable to deep spending cuts.
The reasons are simple. Almost every dollar that states and localities spend on aid for th eneedy, salaries of public employees, and other vital services enters the local economy immediately. So if states cut their spending in these areas, overall demand suffers at a time when demand is already too low and support services are most needed.
The alternative–raising taxes–also reduces spending, but by less than budget cuts of comparable size. And by targeting these taxes appropriately, their negative effects can be minimized. For example, high-income households typically spend only a fraction of their income and save the rest. As a result, each $1 incease in taxes on high-income households will reduce their spending by much less than $1.
Toguchi pressed his case in a subsequent Advertiser op-ed.
In other news, the independent Gannett Blog has blogged its last. It was controversial, biting, and always full of good information. I’m going to miss it.
And I missed the recent bad news for those opposing the long proposed and delayed expansion of the Turtle Bay resort which has been on the books for decades. The Intermediate Court of Appeals turned back a legal challenge which had argued that too much time had passed and conditions changed too much for the project to rely on its original environmental impact study. The ICA ruled otherwise back at the end of May.
And did you catch this mind-warping story? A major heist in a virtual world turned into a criminal case in the “real” world. Really. It can happen.
And Maui News reporter Ilima Loomis put together some “what’s wrong with this picture” reactions to popular portrayals of the news biz on her “Writer’s Block” blog.
Duke’s sister, Maka, was adopted by friends in town back when she was just a kitten. Now she has grown up to look an awful lot like Mr. Duke.
Yesterday I received an email with the subject, “Eerie twilight zone moment”.
Last night we saw Miss Maka in an unusual, for her, posture and grabbed a cell phone to get a shot. Imagine my surprise when I opened your blog this morning to find a photo of Duke doing exactly the same thing. Doo doo dah dah, dah dah doo doo. Or however you do the TZ theme music.
That’s Duke, top, in the photo featured yesterday. And that’s Ms. Maka (below), caught in virtually the same pose.
Discover more from i L i n d
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
I don’t know about the C&C of Honolulu, but here in Berkeley and in most other CA cities, an increasing share of the general fund spending is going to replenish/fund public employee pension funds. The ramp-up has been huge–from $3 million a year to over $15 million a year in just 3 years. Since pensioners are simply drawing the same monthly sum they’ve been getting, this extra $12 million (in our case a full 10% of the entire city general budget) is simply vanishing–it is NOT flowing into workers’ paychecks or into the economy.
Raising taxes to pour into sinking pension funds does not add money to the economy –it takes money out of the pockets of taxpayers who would have spent that money in the economy. Public pensions are the 800-lb. elephant in the room nobody dares discuss because it threatens the politically powerful. How much has the C&C’s contributions to its pension fund increased in the past 4 years? I suspect a lot. That money is a net drain and there’s no way to get around that, especially as pension funds require ever larger contributions to cover their market losses.
Has any Honolulu journalist even looked at pension contributions as force in the budget? I haven’t found anything.
Thanks, Ian. Those pics of the cats made me laugh. How cute!
(From Loomis blog)
Ethics. Honolulu blogger and journalist Ian Lind was troubled by a premise of last year’s State of Play, in which an investigative journalist is a close personal friend of the subject of his investigation.
“That personal connection grows in importance but, while acknowledged as bothersome, doesn’t derail his involvement,” Ian said.
Really Ian? Over the years this has happened to me more times than I’d like to remember. I still have “ex” friends over two stories and a few damaged relationships. People love investigative pieces until it’s their ox being gored.
Regarding pension funding: there are at least two major factors in the growth of employer contributions to government employee funding in recent years.
The first is that the pensions had long been underfunded in the “I need THIS money now, I’ll pay THAT money later” approach to government spending. These so-called “unfunded liabilities” have caught the attention of auditors in recent years and, in order to protect their credit ratings, states have had to begin addressing them to preserve their ability to issue bonds, etc.
The other factor is that these funds have also been not just been underfunded over the years but overtly raided (Cayetano/ERS 1999 or so) or used as as a phantom way to balance the books (Social Security). Again, it’s the “it’ll be someone else’s problem later” approach.
The actuarial handwriting has been on the wall, so to say, for years, if not decades, and our leaders have failed to plan for it. It’s not the retirees’ fault that government made promises, then spent the money elsewhere, hoping against hope that they would later find, to paraphrase, a new Peter to rob so that they could pay Paul.
Our cats do that too!