Even as Honolulu City Council debates Charles Djou’s bill to block collection of the County’s half-percent GET surcharge until a transit plan is decided upon, the Hawaii State Department of Taxation is preparing to collect the tax from every business in the state with even the most indirect connection to Oahu.
Signed by Kurt Kawafuchi, Director of Taxation, the November 8 letter explains, “Starting January 1, 2007, the new 0.5 percent County Surcharge tax must be paid on income earned from business conducted on Oahu ….
“Neighbor island businesses who sell goods or services to customers on Oahu and who have an office or an employee on Oahu or an employee/agent traveling to Oahu to conduct business may also be subject to the County Surcharge Tax.
“Additionally, beginning January 1, 2007, all taxpayers completing the General Excise tax forms must report their taxes by taxation district….
“In general, any income earned from any transaction related to an Oahu customer is subject to the County Surcharge tax (including) …retailing of goods and services, contracting, renting real property or tangible personal property, commissions, and interest income…
“The maximum you can collect from your customer is 4.712%.”
It will likely be 15 years before a rail transit system is built. If Honolulu decides to go ahead with the plan, sister-island residents will be paying for a non-existent railroad, which may still never be built and which almost nobody would ride even if it were built and which won’t do anything to reduce Honolulu traffic, which we don’t drive in very often anyway. And when Honolulu figures all of this out, they will come back for more taxes to build the roads they should be building now -- and we will have to pay for that also, even as private companies offer to build toll roads for less.
Meanwhile we have traffic problems of our own. On the Big Island, Waimea (population 5,000) suffers miles-long traffic jams twice-daily because NIMBYs and “environmentalists” have been blocking construction of a bypass for 40 years now. The Saddle Road is full of holes but now finally under re-construction after 20 years of opposition from pseudo-environmentalists. Volcanically active Puna, the fastest growing area of Hawaii, has only one two-lane road leading in and out for over 40,000 people. It stays jammed all day long. Instead of a new road, the mis-named environmentalists are proposing (drum roll please) a rail line from Hilo to Puna. Kailua-Kona suffers multiple traffic jams because tax-money-hungry county Democrats permitted numerous resorts without the state funding the roads necessary to handle their traffic.
The problem is an undeclared “Congestion Coalition” which actually seeks to create traffic jams. In the rail proposal for Oahu, they are lucky to have harnessed the latest incarnation of their scheme to the backs of unions and building contractors. This is an environmentalist scheme to make Hawaii so miserable for productive citizens that we will all leave these islands to the turtle-worshippers.
Sound farfetched? In the 1990s this level of misery was reached. Hawaii had net outflows of population as locals left the Waihee-Cayetano economic depression for jobs and opportunity on the mainland. Today Hawaii physicians have reached that level of misery and doctors are now leaving the state creating a medical crisis. For teachers that level of misery has existed for many years and DOE classroom positions go unfilled.
Since Hawaii is so beautiful, just how much misery must be created to re-impose the no-growth eco-distopia on all of Oahu? How much environmental damage will be caused in the unlikely-to-actually-occur construction of an imaginary railroad to take nobody nowhere while traffic jams abound? How much are taxpayers going to be forced to give to the state in order to bring about this level of misery for themselves? Should sister-island residents be allotted 25 percent of Oahu City Council seats so we can vote on our own taxes?
Mayor Mufi Hannemann has taken to calling rail opponents “CAVE” -- Consistently Against Virtually Everything. Actually it is rail supporters who are putting forth an expensive proposal to spend 15 years accomplishing nothing traffic-wise while still collecting lots of taxes. It is they who are against real solutions to ease traffic quickly and do so at less cost to the taxpayer. Mayor Hannemann's CAVE may be expensive, but it is still just a CAVE.
Andrew Walden is the publisher and editor of Hawaii Free Press, a Big Island-based newspaper. He can be reached via email at mailto:andrewwalden@email.com
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