ISLAND VOICES
Candidates don't offer positive change

By Richard Weigel
Director of Hawai'i Sustainable Lifestyle Network

Just when I concluded that one of the candidates for governor actually represented a superior choice, out marched the two would-be leaders with their economic proposals, and over the horizon stepped any realistic chance for positive change as seen in the Oct. 20 article, "Plans for economy strikingly similar."

The sameness of the Hirono and Lingle remedies indicates less about the individuals than about the inability of the two major parties to visualize outside the box of neoclassical economics, and our society's addiction to growth-at-any-cost.

Can any institution be a protagonist for the transition to a sustainable lower-consumption economy where livability is a bigger goal than increases in development and production?

Lynda Arakawa's article can only lead to the conclusion that under the Democratic or Republican governor, we can expect a bigger economy and a bigger government to facilitate growth — but we should not expect improvement in either. Bigger, after all, does not mean better.

Larger systems, in nature or culture, rarely produce higher efficiency. Specifically, neither of the parties has a plan to restrict self-destructive growth in urbanization of the countryside. More than just environmentally damaging "sprawl," urban expansion — and government's propensity for subsidizing it — is a major cause of Hawai'i's budget shortfalls.

We must begin asking, for example, "Would Hawai'i's DOE have built a greater than $1 billion CIP shortfall without a policy that requires government to pay 95 percent of the cost of constructing new schools — schools that would be unnecessary without the development of new communities on open space and agricultural land?

Another political opiate our candidates cannot put down is cutting taxes without a realistic method to make up lost revenue. Is no one honest enough to acknowledge the failure of supply-side "solutions"? Even if some new revenue is realized, it is eaten up by increased spending on public services the growth necessitates.

Might the day come when candidates for office are forced to debate economic, environmental and social policy with the realization that each inevitably impacts on all the others? That would signal the debut of a sustainable and ecological politics — exactly the type of "change" we most need.