• True story comes about • The Tax Man cometh • Symbolic victory • What really happened? True story comes about In response to the May 1 “Tax Man” column by Lowell L. Kalapa, this column which was brilliantly written,
• True story comes about •
The Tax Man cometh • Symbolic victory
• What really happened?
True story comes about
In response to the May 1 “Tax Man” column by Lowell L. Kalapa, this column which was brilliantly written, should have been printed on the front page, in order that no body missed reading it.
I strongly recommend if anyone has not read it it’s a must. You will soon realize the real truth of how our government is making the critical decisions regarding our deficit, with the continuing smoke screens of fees (taxes) that will continue to raise the costs of living here.
Mr. Kalapa is the first person to come forward who truly knows and understands the solutions needed for all governments to make the right decisions to move our economy forward.
Our lawmakers are hell bent on doing it their way. Mr. Kouchi runs an ad to the people saying he’s looking for answers. What a cop out, as if to say “don’t blame me if I make the wrong decisions.”
Every politician in the state should have a fresh copy of Mr. Kalapa’s column. We can call it their instructions manual, how to solve the problems!
Their decision-making is nothing more but another chapter of “government trying to save us from ourselves.”
Mr. Kalapa, nobody could have said it better than you, sir, “when and until government gets out of the way and allows the economy to flourish, we can all look for the worse times ahead.” Thank you so much for bring the true story out.
Steve Martin, Kapa‘a
The Tax Man cometh
Every Sunday we are treated to a column from Lowell L. Kalapa from his Tax Foundation of Hawai‘i on the Government page.
I decided to dig deeper into this “private, nonprofit, nonpartisan, educational organization” and found on its website a listing of its funders. The two-page list reveals that corporations (including Reynolds Tobacco and Tesoro), small businesses, executives, accountants, and professionals make up the majority of its backers.
So it’s now not surprising to me that his columns are critical of taxing businesses, while being supportive of an “across the board” tax increase as he posited in his recent contribution on May 1, “The Tax Man: Obstructing economic growth worsens social problems.” An across the board general excise tax increase is favorable to businesses because those most impacted by a GET increase are the middle class and the poor.
To support this claim, we need only dial back to a 2008 article from Kalapa himself who detailed the “disparate” impact the GET has on low-income families as “the general excise tax is not kind to families, let alone the economy, as the cost of doing business is magnified by a tax that tends to pyramid.”
Yet 2011 Kalapa has reversed course calling for its raising as the solution. But what’s key is that he advocates a raising only of the public’s GET, not businesses as he made clear in his April 6 piece on restructuring our government. There, he bemoans the legislature’s proposal to remove exemptions that many businesses get from paying the GET on certain items.
So Kalapa is in favor of raising the GET on all of us except business interests — clearly outlining his business-favored partisanship. A partisanship he masks behind carefully manufactured columns that are supposed to be “educational.”
While in all of this he admits that we are in tough economic times nationally, he wants us to believe that the troubling economic times Hawaii businesses are having stem from our tax policies — a bold claim when one can look everywhere in the nation and see states struggling regardless of their tax policies.
He would have us believe that Hawai‘i’s hungry families are caused directly by legislators in these troubling economic times, yet provides no evidence for such a claim except his own “factual” statements. I am not fooled by your purported claim to nonpartisanship or education, Mr. Kalapa, and I hope other TGI readers will take your future submissions with a grain of salt.
Christopher O’Brien, Lihu‘e
Symbolic victory
We agree with Dan Shook (“Forgiveness is the path to peace on Earth,” Letters, May 3).
It is only a symbolic victory unless we bring our troops home and end these senseless wars, killing innocent people and our soldiers.
Cliff and Cecelia Waeschle, Kilauea
What really happened?
Why was the historic capture and assassination of Bin Laden not photographed? The police videotape everything these days, even when I was issued a trespass warning last June, the police had two video camera’s rolling of my every word.
Everyone has cell phones, why didn’t the navy seals take pictures of Bin Laden’s bullet-ridden dead body with their cell phones as proof?
What really happened? Is this for political ratings, will this trigger more terrorism, are we even being told the truth?
James “Kimo” Rosen, Kapa‘a
