Plans are underway by certain members of U.S. Congress (House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Neil Abercrombie, Mazie Hirono, and the group I affectionately refer to as “that San Francisco crowd”) to radically alter the way Hawaii residents commute to work, go shopping, take our kids to school, go to the beach, and participate in virtually every activity that takes us away from our homes.

The first part of the plan is currently taking shape in Washington. After taking control of the banking industry, Wall Street, and the insurance industry, Speaker Pelosi is now taking over the auto industry and mandating that carmakers (in order to continue receiving taxpayer -- yours and my -- bailout funds and essentially stay in business) put total emphasis in electric, ethanol, and hybrid technology cars and abandon production of larger gasoline powered vehicles.

Car shoppers (even those who cannot afford a new car) will be given a $7500 tax credit to purchase an expensive new car that gets more than 30 miles per gallon. She will sweeten the deal by making the sales tax paid on these vehicles tax deductable and having taxpayers make the payments if the buyer defaults.

The next phase of the plan has precedence in last year’s oil price run-up. We saw that Hawaii residents dramatically altered their driving habits and conserved fuel when the price of gas rose haphazardly to an unsustainable price of over $4.50 per gallon.

Unfortunately for Mr. Abercrombie, Mrs. Hirono and “that San Francisco crowd,” oil and gas prices returned to a more affordable and sustainable level. Since they cannot count on oil returning to the prices of last summer, they must artificially and dramatically increase the cost of gasoline through the only other means available -- raising federal gasoline taxes -- means at which they are very adroit.

Gubernatorial Candidate Abercrombie will then return to Hawaii “bringing change from Washington to Washington Place” in the form of a radical socialist agenda that has served him all too well these past few months. He will undoubtedly pile on higher state taxes and, with Mrs. Hirono’s help, develop a state highway and roadway toll usage system that will allow only hybrid technology, electric car, three-person carpools and public transportation vehicles to utilize the federal highway system without hefty road usage tolls and vehicle registration fees.

Non-compliant drivers would be eligible to use only state roads and surface streets. For example, a Mililani Mauka resident driving to her work downtown would be forced to traverse Meheula Parkway through Mililani to Kamehameha Highway, drive through Pearl City, Aiea and the Pearl Harbor area onto Nimitz Highway and so on into town. The only alternative to a two-hour commute will be to get on the Abercrombie/Hirono bandwagon.

Naturally, Candidate Abercrombie will laugh this off as ludicrous political demagoguery and fear mongering. But mark my words: He will be elected, go behind closed doors, and do it.

Back when the price of gas was above $4.50 a gallon, advocates for the consumer, to the chagrin of environmental extremists such as Al Gore, proclaimed that that was the time to reduce state and federal gasoline taxes.

Conversely, advocates for big government, high taxes, and unrecoverable runaway spending currently rationalize that, if the time when gas prices were high was time to lower taxes, now is indeed the time to raise them. And if a small increase is good, an even larger increase is better.

Better inasmuch that a permanent, five-fold increase of combined federal/state taxes from $.51 to $2.55 per gallon would result in the cost of a gallon of gas to increase to around $5.00 generating revenues for state and federal coffers and advancing an extreme environmentalist agenda by keeping cars off the road further reducing gasoline usage and greenhouse gases.

This permanent gasoline cost increase -- combined with the draconian Abercrombie/Hirono roadway use plan -- will ultimately reduce the number of vehicles on Hawaii roads between 50 and 80 percent.

Add in the inevitable legal challenges from radical “get in your face” environmental groups, bureaucratic bickering, budget overruns, and endless headaches that a gargantuan light rail project will encounter (i.e. problems with H-3, Superferry, etc.), the need for and associated opportunity cost of light rail renders the necessity moot. It certainly behooves us to stop this light rail madness before it begins.

Better yet, let’s just stop Mr. Abercrombie, Mrs. Hirono, and “that San Francisco crowd.”

LCDR John W. Willoughby, USNR-Retired, is a resident of Honolulu, Hawaii

Guest Commentary...