On Opening Day, the Legislature gave a lot of fine speeches about how lawmakers were really going to knuckle down and tackle the “affordability crisis” and Hawai‘i’s high cost of living the session.
So far, they’ve done the opposite.
For example, yesterday Rep. David Tarnas killed House Bill 1611, which, as we reported yesterday, “would have reduced Hawai‘i's general excise tax on groceries and nonprescription drugs each year until removing it entirely in 2034.”
Hawai‘i residents have been crying out for this regressive tax on daily life to be removed for years. So why did Tarnas, chair of the House Committee on Judiciary and Hawaiian Affairs, kill it?
“[I] can’t in good conscience move forward with a bill that might have a quarter-billion dollars in fiscal impact,” he said.
Fiscal impact on state government, he means. The fact that these taxes have a quarter-billion dollars in fiscal impact on all of us matters not one bit to him and his likeminded legislators.
These people are thinking about themselves, not you.
Oh, it gets worse.
Yesterday, Gov. Josh Green asked lawmakers for another $100 million for Covid-era hazard pay for public workers, as Civil Beat reported. This is in addition to past hazard pay bonuses. “The Legislature already appropriated nearly $459 million in 2024 and almost $145 million more last year for hazard pay,” CB notes, “which was required during the pandemic under the state contracts with the Hawaiʻi Government Employees Association and the United Public Workers union."
And now the teachers also want hazard pay, the article says. “The Hawaiʻi State Teachers Association is also lobbying lawmakers for pandemic hazard pay for about 13,000 teachers,” CB notes.
HSTA wants the pay mainly because, while they did not have a hazard pay clause in their contract, members of HGEA did, including HGEA members who work in the schools, explains that article. “Those people got $20,000 and our members got zero,” HSTA President Osa Tui, Jr. said. “Our teachers put their lives on the line during this time. It just rubs the wrong way that we then get sidelined on this issue.”
Put. Their lives. On the line.
They did no such thing. In case our Legislators have forgotten, the schools closed.
They closed. They shut their doors in March 2020 and would not resume in-person education until August 2021.
And while they were shut, they had highly risk-averse criteria for reopening.
“Hawai‘i’s public schools are expected to stay shut until Covid-19 is no longer spreading in the community, defined as four weeks with no new cases, according to the Department of Education,” wrote Star-Advertiser reporter Susan Essoyan, April 9, 2020.
Also, while closed, Hawai‘i schools received some $639 million in federal funding under three different batches of Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief, in part to fund their own closure to in-person education.
The DOE bought nearly 70,000 digital devices and MiFi hotspots specifically to work from home and avoid any hazard.
And what was the result? After a $639-million windfall, what did the DOE deliver?
Test scores plummeted. The DOE has been talking about a recovery in those scores in the years since, but its a recovery from abysmal to merely alarming. As of the most recent 2025 Strive HI report, just 41% of students are proficient in math, 43% in science, and 53% in language arts.
Absenteeism spiked (page 519 at the link), from 18% of students chronically absent in the 2020-2021 school year to 37% in 2021-2022, 30% in 2022-2023. Chronic absenteeism is still running at 25%.
(Distinct possibility: The gain in test scores could be an illusion — how many chronically absent students skipped the test? If they’re missing that much school, chances are, they weren’t going to be measured as among the proficient.)
Hazard pay for teachers? The taxpayers should get a refund from the DOE.
All of this government worker hazard pay lands squarely on the backs on people who got no such accommodation in the private sector while facing the same risks. Whose businesses were shut down, by government order. Whose jobs disappeared. Who now face the permanently high prices caused the massive inflation spike during the Biden administration — as high as 9% year over year, as high as nearly 18% monthly, annualized — as the feds confronted borrowing more than $4 trillion for Covid relief.
What a great deal for Hawai‘i state government this has been: Help inflate the cost of goods with the Covid lockdowns, then reap higher GET revenues off the inflated prices. No wonder legislators want to keep their hands in our grocery bills.
Every time you eat, the state eats you.
A. Kam Napier is editor in chief of Aloha State Daily. His opinions in Pipikaula Corner are his own and not reflective of the ASD team.
For the latest news of Hawai‘i, sign up here for our free Daily Edition newsletter.
A. Kam Napier can be reached at kam@alohastatedaily.com.
