Editorials
Wednesday, March 18, 1998HOUSE Republicans have come up with an alternative way to handle state government budget cuts. Rather than cut programs across the board, they want to recruit teams of executives from private business and nonprofit organizations to study programs and recommend ways to make government "smaller and better." House GOP plan
to shrink governmentUnder the plan, Minority Leader Quentin Kawananakoa said, "Diamond" teams would be dispatched to study the Department of Education, the University of Hawaii, the departments of Health, Public Safety, Transportation, Human Services and a combination of Budget and Finance, Accounting and General Services and Human Resources. Their aim would be to make government work more efficiently and at less cost.
In addition, "Heart" teams created with the help of Aloha United Way and other nonprofit groups would study the departments of Education, Health and Human Services. Their goal would not be to cut spending but to ensure that the money allocated is used most effectively to assist the disadvantaged and disabled.
The idea has appeal, because nongovernmental expertise certainly could be useful in streamlining government to deal with reduced revenues. But it also conveniently avoids the need for the Republicans to declare which programs should be cut to bring government spending down. They are calling for bigger tax and spending cuts than the Democrats.
Kawananakoa said the borrowed executives would be asked to make their recommendations for program cuts in a month. Even if they did, it would be too late to affect the current budget negotiations in the Legislature. And it would be naive to expect that such recommendations would be adopted immediately and unquestioningly. Too many reports on state government reorganization and reform sit gathering dust, never having been given serious consideration.
Still, the Republicans are on to something. Across-the-board cuts spread the pain evenly but they are an abdication of the Legislature's responsibility to make choices, to decide what is worth saving and what is not. In making those choices, the legislators need all the expert help they can get.
GASOLINE prices have been much higher in Hawaii than the mainland average for decades, but the gap has grown wider in recent months. From December 1996 through last month, prices of the two main types of crude oil used in Hawaii to make gasoline have fallen about 47 percent. During the same period, the average retail price of self-serve regular gas has barely changed in Hawaii while the average mainland price has dropped nearly 14 percent. Gasoline prices
The failure of Hawaii motorists to share in the lower prices experienced on the mainland has revived questions about the reason for the gap and suspicion that the oil companies are gouging consumers here. A two-part series of reports by the Star-Bulletin's Rob Perez explored these questions this week.
However, no clear conclusion emerged from those reports. Perez quoted Tim Hamilton, a mainland petroleum consultant, who claimed that Hawaii consumers were overcharged more than $81 million for gasoline over the past 14 months because of artificially high wholesale prices.
But a spokesman for Chevron Corp., which owns one of Hawaii's two refineries, called the analysis flawed. Fereidun Fesharaki, a petroleum expert at the East-West Center, said local gas prices are reasonable in view of the cost pressures that the refineries here face. Moreover, an official of BHP, which owns Hawaii's other refinery, said the company is trying to sell it because its profits are unacceptably low.
The Legislature is looking into the question, but there are no quick and easy answers. Unless conclusive evidence of price-fixing is developed -- and a previous investigation found no such evidence -- government should refrain from interfering.
IN considering the world's most influential people of this century, it is impossible to exclude Dr. Benjamin Spock, the pediatrician whose advice has been accepted by generations of parents. His reassuring message that parents should trust their own instincts was a departure from previous conventional wisdom about baby and child care. Spock died Sunday at age 94. Dr. Benjamin Spock
Much of the success of his 1946 book, now titled "Dr. Spock's Baby and Child Care," can be credited to his method of putting together the book and its extraordinary timing. He dictated it over a three-year period to his first wife, achieving a conversational tone in providing advice to new parents during the post-World War II baby boom. In its first six years, more than four million copies were sold. Over six editions, nearly 50 million copies have been sold in 37 countries and 42 languages; it is considered the second biggest seller ever, behind the Bible.
While a standard 1928 book on infant and child care told parents never to kiss their children or hold them in their laps, Spock wrote about displaying love and respect. The book was criticized for being permissive, although he wrote that "the spoiled child is not a happy creature even in his own home."
When young people who had been reared by Spock's methods took to the streets to protest the Vietnam War in the 1960s, the doctor became a leader in their ranks and was arrested more than a dozen times for civil disobedience. Vice President Spiro Agnew blamed "Spockmanship" for the anti-war protests.
Such conclusions are not so simple; book sales dropped during the Vietnam War, and most baby boomers rejected his radical politics. Spock's real influence has been on the way parents around the world raise their children.
Rupert E. Phillips, CEO
John M. Flanagan, Editor & Publisher
David Shapiro, Managing Editor
Diane Yukihiro Chang, Senior Editor & Editorial Page Editor
Frank Bridgewater & Michael Rovner, Assistant Managing Editors
A.A. Smyser, Contributing Editor
