IF someone told you of a state that ranked in the bottom 10 for public libraries per 100,000 residents, in the top five for kids in private school while still keeping 42 percent of the state civil service involved in education, what would you say? Hawaii’s dismal
economic statisticsI'd say, "Welcome home," because those are just some of the sorry statistics about Hawaii.
Interestingly, the stats are not being kept by Forbes magazine or the state Republicans, but by Gov. Ben Cayetano's own administration. The figures come from the working papers being gathered by the Cayetano economic task force.
Here's a few more to get you really riled up.
We had in 1995 the highest cost of living in the nation.
By 1996 we had racked up the worst rate of job growth. Every other state had more people on a per capita basis owning homes.
Our average pay is $26,977, below the national average.
If it is tough to live here, it is also a lousy place to do business, because:
An independent study by Regional Financial Associates says Hawaii leads all states in cost of doing business.
There are some who think Cayetano's tiff with football Coach Fred vonAppen triggered the ulcer which landed the governor in the hospital last week. I suspect, however, he got an advance peak at these figures and just started hemorrhaging.
Grim as those figures are, they only tell part of the story of the problems bedeviling Hawaii today.
There is little said about the influence of the county and state bureaucracy in strangling Hawaii's vitality. Those forces of status quo and complacency fight any economic progress.
There is no way to measure the anti-competitive spirit alive in government that stops administrators from rewarding the innovators and culling the slackers. Some of it comes from unions priming their membership to resist change, part of it comes from politicians ready to defend their union supporters and another part comes from the bureaucracy's deeply held suspicion that change will make life more difficult.
Cayetano's administration may have just opened the flood gates by calling for the economic task force and then setting up the four subcommittees.
It is the subcommittees that are using the gloomy statistics to analyze the problem and then fashion solutions. The danger comes if they say the problem is fundamental and so must be the cure.
CAYETANO might find himself at the head of a divided task force, with the rabble-rousers on the subcommittees pushing for change, while the major committee, composed of many of the state's forces for the status quo, is for holding the line.
What could happen is that Cayetano is handed enough of a demand for change from one group and enough of a resistance to change from the rest of the group that he has nowhere to turn.
Then his only viable political alternative would be to adopt the successful strategy of former U.S. Rep. Cecil Heftel, who won re-election by running against Congress.
Cayetano's campaign message will be re-elect him to save us from ourselves. It might work.
Star-Bulletin Economy Special