Honolulu Lite
THERE'S an old Democratic saying: If it moves, tax it. If it doesn't move subsidize it. ’Tis season of goblins,
ghosts and feesActually, the Democrats don't say that. The Republicans say that's the way Democrats do business.
While the Honolulu City Council is technically nonpartisan, it clearly has Democratic leanings and it has a proven track record of taxing everything that moves.
I use the word "tax" in the broadest sense. To me, a tax is any of my money that I am forced to cough up to the government in any way. That includes fees, surcharges, stipends, assessments, duties or tariffs.
The dictionary describes a tax as "a charge imposed on people for a public purpose." That's what those other words mean, too. This being the Halloween season, you could say that all those other words are just taxes dressed up to look like something less scary.
The trouble for people whose job it is to take as much of our money as they can is that the rest of us are tired of being taxed up to our eyeballs. Raising taxes today is political suicide and all elected public officials know it. At the same time, they are incapable of NOT taxing us. They are like addicts, strung out at the public trough, unable to envision any other way of keeping the bloated, ravaged government corpus alive other than mainlining ever-increasing doses of our moola-coola.
GOVERNMENT needs to join a Twelve-Step program, get off the junk, slim down, get in shape ... get a JOB, for chrissakes. Instead, it sits gross and swollen on the couch, coddled by its chief enablers, City Council members and other elected officials. The government's life-sustaining budget, which is to say its pulse, heartbeat and blood pressure, is dangerously over-stressed. It needs tough love. Instead, it gets another quick fix and we pay the tab.
Where are we going here? To the City Council's desire to raise "fees" for the use of public parks, sports fields and golf courses. Golfers have always paid a nominal amount to play at city-owned courses. Compared to the costs of private courses, the cost of playing at a city course was one of the best deals in the country. And golfers understand that a golf course takes a lot more upkeep than a tennis court or softball diamond.
Upset with the $2 proposed raise in golf course fees, Council member Rene Mansho is now suggesting fees be charged for all city-owned sports facilities: swimming pools, softball fields, tennis courts, etc. As chairman of the budget committee, Mansho is the enabler who sits on the couch stroking city and county government's feverish forehead, figuring out how to raise money for its next fix.
Her heart may be in the right place, but raising taxes, even in the guise of fees, is not going to solve the problem. Honolulu city government is a substance abuser and the substance it is abusing is our money. Injecting it with fees instead of taxes is like giving a drug addict morphine instead of heroin. You aren't doing the patient any favors; you are just prolonging the inevitable crash.
What's the answer? Dynamic thinking that looks beyond today's nicks and cuts to how the injuries happened in the first place. Leaders who can get together and work for the good of the patient, not the good of their careers. What the city government needs is major surgery, not yet another Band-Aid that, ironically, bleeds us all just a little more dry.
Charles Memminger, winner of
National Society of Newspaper Columnists
awards in 1994 and 1992, writes "Honolulu Lite"
Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
Write to him at the Honolulu Star-Bulletin,
P.O. Box 3080, Honolulu, 96802
or send E-mail to charley@nomayo.com or
71224.113@compuserve.com.
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