 And welcome today to Think Tech Hawaii's Hawaii Together on the Think Tech Hawaii Broadcast Network. I'm Kaylee Ikeena and I welcome you to our little study today. I've got some guests and you're going to enjoy meeting them. I have David Swan who is the cartoonist for the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii and Joe Kent the executive vice president. We're going to talk a little bit about taking complex ideas and making them easy to understand and actually fun to understand how to think better by using cartoons. That's something that's a skill that has been learned by some of the great cartoonists and you may have seen some of the work of David Swan in his mainland publications or in the Honolulu Star Advertiser. There was a series called Trouble and Paradise that he did for many years and he worked for the Star Ad as well. Today he works for the Grassroot Institute and I'd like to welcome him to the program. Welcome David. Good to have you on board. Thanks for having me on the show. Well you do great work and it's just a delight to chat with you a little bit about it. Welcome Joe Kent our vice president. Thank you very much Joe. Thank you. Thank you. Now a lot of times Joe and I pull our hair out. We try to take complex ideas and reduce them to the size of a bumper sticker which is a lot of hard work. What is harder coming up with the ideas or coming up with how to communicate those ideas. Oh communicating them absolutely because you know we're basically a bunch of nerds in an office and we're trying to relate to regular people and that can be challenging sometimes. That's why we are glad to have artists like David. David how long have you been drawing? When did you start drawing? I started drawing when I was a couple years old. Couple years old. I don't know if I could hold a pen when I was a couple years old. I mean I could use my hands and go like this with my mush. Yeah well this was a million years before the internet so we had things pens and pencils to entertain ourselves. Anyway when I was a kid I used to just sit in the corner and draw and I was happy to do that. When I got into high school I did cartoons for the high school newspaper. I didn't really know what I wanted to do after that. Join the Air Force and then I decided I thought I'd like to be an editorial cartoonist or either a comic strip artist. So what caused you to become a cartoonist? Bad genetics? No. I don't know. I think it's an eight. Some people can draw some things that they see easily. I was never very good at actual fine art. I could do the cartoons easily because cartoons are kind of the lowest form and so it wasn't that much of a stretch to do. And I was a keen student of Mad Magazine as I was growing up. Late 60s early 70s Mad Magazine was sort of like the only satire out there. There wasn't anything on television. There weren't really that many magazines out there that made fun of people. And I thought that was really pretty cool when I would read Mad and Alfred E. Newman and all that stuff and it kind of stuck with me. Well that's something. We appreciate the way you're using that to help Grassroot Institute publicize ideas. Joe, you work really hard on our ideas in terms of individual liberty and free markets and limited accountable government. All kinds of issues ranging from the cost of the rail system to whether the government has enough money in the accounts that are covering our pensions for public workers and so forth. How has using cartoons helped to convey these ideas and get them across? Well it's definitely been a game changer. I mean to have someone sit down and read a full 20 page study about the employee retirement system or the employer union trust fund and the billions of dollars in unfunded liabilities that we have is very difficult but when you can just have someone glance at a cartoon that they say a picture is worth a thousand words. And that really helps a lot and convey the ideas. People share them and like them on Facebook and spread it around so it reaches a lot more people than our 20 page studies. Now David, although the whole team comes together to work on putting the ideas into your cartoons you're the point of the spear. And in your career I'm sure you've received praise from some people and otherwise from others. Can you recall any moments, any instances in which you've been attacked for your cartoons? Yeah, when I was a cartoonist, an outdoor cartoonist in Alabama for my first eight or nine years of my career and a medium-sized newspaper with Huntsville Times and Huntsville, Alabama and I knew I'd arrived when I started getting hate mail that they would print in the paper. It wasn't like it is now where someone can send an instant text and be mad about something. Back then the big thing was to read the letters to the editor. It was easy pickings back then. It was a lot of fun because it was during the Reagan era and Ronald Reagan was pretty easy to draw. The 80s were just, you know, fighter pilots would call it a target-rich environment because it was always very easy to parody or satirize so much that was going on around me. Of course it's nothing compared to today. You look back to those times and you think, wow, how quaint. Yeah, so my career started in the 80s and I remember one time I was on the radio in the late 80s, somebody had me on the radio and I didn't really have that much of a stance on the Palestinian issue but it was a pretty big deal back then and I had drawn probably a pretty insensitive cartoon at the time and I was pretty young and I didn't really know better but I can't quite remember the cartoon itself, the specific cartoon but I remember I came into the radio station and the host had brought in several people from Palestine and he hadn't told me that when I was coming on it. It was sort of an ambush and I was kind of wide-eyed but that was one time I can remember I was sort of sweating a little bit. Wow, it could be a dangerous life possibly. Joe, one of the things that we do at grassroots is try to determine where Hawaii is with respect to the rest of the nation and that's valuable because it helps us to see where we have to improve and in some cases where we're actually leading the country and where we can grow further and one of those areas has to deal with taxes. So frequently in your work you're surveying other states finding out exactly what their tax policy is and one of the things that we discovered is that when it comes to inheritance taxes, death taxes so to speak, Hawaii is very expensive. In fact we've learned that we're really amongst the worst states in terms of such attack. That's right, we're rated the worst in the nation in 50 out of 50 on the estate tax although it tied with some other states and this year we got even worse. I mean the estate tax, they hiked the estate tax at the state legislature to about 20% for certain groups and so that's going to be a lot of money taken from folks who are passing their property, their inheritance I guess and that's going to have an effect on our economy and also the people that decide to live here. That's right, in fact we've had the brain drain of the young going away to college for college opportunities and for jobs after that but now we have the age drain so to speak people who are in retirement who are leaving who had never imagined that they would leave but they're leaving for a variety of reasons one of them is the cost of inheritance taxes. In fact when it came time for us to try to convey that to the public you turned to David so I want to throw up a cartoon Dave for you to explain let's put the first one up something David came up with to express this idea what talk is through this? Well first of all I'd like to give credit where credit is due the people around me, Jacqueline Young and Joe Cant, Joshua Mason, Mark Coleman they're really good about coming up with a basic idea the idea that they want to be addressed that week and they give me a certain amount of leeway as to exactly how to convey it, how to illustrate it so whenever you draw an editorial cartoon there's a million different ways you can approach it I always like to think of immediacy there's some cartoons that you can look at and it takes you a little bit of time to understand it but when I'm trying to be more immediate and I thought the most immediate way to approach this was just to have a man saying at least they can't tax me when I die and then someone saying well actually and just trail off and then you can read the headline which the second man is holding the newspaper saying Hawaii raises death tax so you actually kind of get people to think that's what the trailing off is well actually they can tax me after I die the punchline is the headline of the newspaper and you kind of always want to you want to make sure that's first and foremost with people and you don't want to lose it and when I first started it took me a while to understand that that you had to, there's a certain cadence or a rhythm or a pacing that's right because when you think you have to picture yourself as the reader they don't know anything, they're not inside your head it's not just a sign that says taxes are bad you're trying to create some cognitive activity in the process you're trying to create some anticipation that's very interesting there's another issue in which we ask you to help us out and that is the fact that as we look across the country there are numerous transportation boondoggles you've got the big dig up in Boston you've got the Alaska Road Bridge to Nowhere you've got the California transportation system which the federal government has now defunded and of course we've got the Honolulu area Rapid Transit the heart and the ongoing saga of a program that was supposed to be what, 2.5 billion to start off with Joe and then it's going to be well over 10 billion when it's finished and we're not even halfway through and it's become the most expensive per capita transportation project on planet Earth that's right, yeah and so my job that I signed you Joe is help people get it well that's right and a lot of people say okay that's a lot of money 10 billion dollars or 9 billion dollars whatever it is but then there's another question a lot of people ask is well what about after the rails built and who's going to operate the rail as it goes on and who's going to pay for that so that's one thing that we were saying hmm maybe we can make a cartoon about this well let's throw the next one up Dave talk us through this what you came up with so the second one here about the rail again you know immediacy you want to be able to get the message across as quickly as possible so you have the man on the left almost like your first kind of like fall guy from the first carton saying where will the money come from operate and maintain the rail pretty direct and then your politician who's in the red shirt to the right there's no worries bro don't worry about it and you know behind him comes this tsunami of taxes and again it was a you know I have to say you know Joe and his crew come up with some really good ideas and they give me some leeway as to how to actually illustrate it and so it works out pretty well well that's very good sometimes we want to convey that there are certain ideas that are utterly ludicrous and so it helps to compare them to well let's talk for example about some of the legislation that has been proposed recently for people who rent out a bedroom either through Airbnb or just as a vacation rental and so forth naturally we have to balance the needs of the community with the rights of the individual their property and the right to make a little bit of additional money but our legislators and our city council people have come up with proposals to really penalize people and Joe what are some of those penalties that have been proposed well there was a bill that was passed at the Honolulu council to basically ban the Airbnb or vacation rental practice of renting your home out and sharing it with a visitor and the bill basically finds these people thousands of dollars per day sometimes $10,000 sometimes $5,000 per day and we've seen on and it can really add up yeah we've seen on some counties where it actually racks up to millions of dollars for some people and so you know we're always asking well how far is too far when it comes to this well let's see what David came up with we've got about a minute left let's take a look yeah so just real quick the two guys in the jail OCCC he's just you know you got a scruffy looking guy saying he's in in for robbing a bank how about you and the poor guy on the right says I shared my home with a guest and I think that says it all right there in that one moment what we've done is we've taken something which is a minor infraction and elevated it into a major felony offense and that's the ludicracy of what happens in public policy sometime well Dave we're going to take a quick break and come back and take a look at a few more cartoons my guest today is David Swan who is the cartoonist at the grassroot institute and our executive vice president who handles our policy work Joe Kent don't go away we'll be right back on think tech Hawaii's Hawaii together Aloha I'm Keisha King host of at the crossroads where we have conversations that are real and relevant we have spoken with community leaders from right here locally in Hawaii and all around the world won't you join us on ThinkTechHawaii.com or on YouTube on the ThinkTech Hawaii channel our conversations are real relevant and lots of fun I'll see you at the crossroads Aloha Aloha my name is Mark Shklav I am the host of ThinkTech Hawaii's Law Across the Sea program my program airs every other Monday at one o'clock on ThinkTech Hawaii most of my programs deal with my own life and law experience recently I interviewed Alex Jampel who I have known for over 30 years about his voyage across the sea as a lawyer from Tokyo to Hawaii those are the type of stories that I like to bring and like to talk about human stories about law and life. Aloha well thanks for not going away Akina back with you and David Swan our cartoonist at Grassroot Institute and Joe Kent and one of the things that we're going to pick up on is the fact that the kind of humor that really changes minds doesn't always have to attack individuals I think that when you see a lot of the political drama that takes place in campaigns as well as between campaigns as political figures comment upon each other's work there is a great deal of attack upon individuals one of the natural things to do for cartoonists is to make fun of individuals not only for their policies but also for their facial features their noses or their hair their eyes the way they walk the way they talk and so forth but Joe as we were talking about our editorial policy at Grassroot we felt that that may not be the most productive way to reach out to people and generate sympathy for ideas that's right we generally don't like to focus on attacking people we would rather look at ideas and let's talk about ideas sometimes that can be difficult to convey in a cartoon format but Dave does a great job oh well thanks I was just thinking about the difference between working for Grassroot and working at a daily newspaper doing editorial cartoons and that probably is the main difference in the cartoons of the content is that we were sort of in fashion now sort of personality assassination and I never have meant anything to be truly malicious I always thought well it's all in fun but one time a few years ago it kind of came home to me when the editorial page editor the star avatars have told me that she was talking to a woman who worked for Heco and this is back when they were being beat up in the news a lot about the solar panel issue and so the woman was almost in tears and she told her that she had seen one of my cartoons and I had portrayed Heco as this devil like a little devil with a pitched fork and the horns and I had no idea at the time when I drew that that I could possibly hurt anyone's feelings but I thought oh it's a joke it's a cartoon devil but then I made me start thinking wow some people actually do take some of this to heart so it's nice to see that Grassroot Institute doesn't go that route not that there's anything wrong nowadays unfortunately the way people are it seems like the loudest person screaming gets the most attention but I think it's an effective way for you guys to get across the ideas and every time Joe sends over an idea I've always noticed that it's not about a person it's about an idea or a concept well that's what we want to talk about we want to raise the awareness of ideas and help people to understand them talk about them and to choose the best ideas regardless of party line, personality ethnicity, religion and so forth and so as you notice we're not attacking people for those qualities and so forth we're actually trying to illustrate an idea for example one of the most complex ideas to illustrate is the fact that government does some things well and should do certain things but it does other things very very badly for a whole host of reasons I mean complex service oriented businesses like running and maintaining an airport you know that's something that the government is not particularly better than a corporation would be and in many ways privatizing that or a good deal of it would actually bring about great improvements that's what our research shows by looking all across the world and across the country so Joe you were wrestling with that idea with some recent legislation proposed regarding the Honolulu International Airport that's right I mean if you look across the nation most airports are not run by the government they're run by a third party either privately run or some airport authority or something like that but in Hawaii our airport is run basically by the government by the Department of Transportation and also we're one of the worst looking airports I think in the nation and a lot of visitors to Hawaii would agree to that and so a lot of people are asking well how can we update the airport and there's this idea of an airport authority let's have an airport authority to help try to manage the airport like other states mysteriously that that concept keeps dying it's been you know floated in bills about four years and it's died four years in a row now but we're keeping it alive as an idea you helped us to convey exactly what the problem is with our current system let's pull up this next cartoon I was trying to figure out a way to show the degradation or the run down state of the airport in a cartoon and when I started to actually draw the cartoon I realized it wasn't really that easy I had to focus on a couple of small things like zooming out on people just walking down a hallway with holes punched in the wall and leaking water fountains I always notice when I go through the airport I'm looking for water and it seems like half of them are covered up with garbage bags or something so the idea there is that someone saying the obvious which something should be done and then right below that the headline is that the state rejects new airport authority for the fourth time on a row which again the punch line is if you're reading left to right like we do in the west for the most part the punch line is at the bottom right of the page and so you kind of direct the reader's eye to read up left first and then go down to the punch line on the newspaper so yeah that's another great idea that was given to me by the fresh route crew very effective bringing people into a sense of really what's wrong at the airport and packing a lot of information in there ending up with the punch line that our state is basically continuing to decline to use the most reasonable option for solving the problem. Sometimes cartoons also allow us to lift our thinking above the local problem that we deal with to lofty ideals and values that our nation was founded upon and one issue in which I think we've asked you to help us out with is that of civil acid forfeiture that's a technical term civil acid forfeiture for giving police and government the power to take property and in the case of Hawaii to take people's property even before they've been convicted of a felony and then not give it back unless they get a lawyer to petition it through a lengthy process and so forth and as a result we notice that we were recently ranked as one of the bottom states in the nation with a grade of D minus for our civil acid forfeiture laws our legislature had a proposal to attempt to change that but that failed this past term actually it passed thanks for correcting me and so the actually the legislature passed the bill that would have corrected the civil acid forfeiture practice and basically required police to have a felony conviction before taking people's stuff and that bill though unfortunately was vetoed by Governor E. Gay yes that's what I was referring to the law itself did not pass right but how do we bring the situation to the public eye how do we talk about it let's look at the next cartoon Dave you've helped us out here and this one was done on July 4th I believe so we wanted to relate that right so again you know this one was you always look for ones you can do really simply without even a thought balloon or any type of someone saying something and this one was it was given to me okay how do we show the torch being taken from the Statue of Liberty by the police under the civil asset forfeiture laws and so this was one of the simpler ones which was you know it was a pretty straightforward cartoon it was just a matter of I think the biggest difficulty I had is how do I get that all that hype sort of civil asset forfeiture onto the crane because cranes aren't usually going to hurt so I just had to fatten it up that's the nice thing about cartooning is you could just change the proportion but what I really like about this is it takes a problem that is often seen at the smallest level someone losing their home or losing their car at the local level and talks about it in terms of the grand idea of liberty you have the Statue of Liberty forfeiting her torch I mean that says it all there that's how this cartoon helps us understand this issue and another good thing about that cartoon by the way is that it doesn't have a lot of text and everything is visual you just take one glance at it and you know what it is well another situation that we were talking about in our policy meeting that in Honolulu County and this is true to some extent in the other counties as well but in Honolulu County in particular we have a problem with the trash collection in terms of the costs involved and now the complexity in being able to get through some of the political maneuvering there Joe tell us a little bit about that yeah basically the trash pickup in Honolulu is done people dump their trash and the city picks it up there has been some complaining about how much this cost the city and so they tried to hike a tax fee basically saying that we need more money to do this that was shot down and so now they have to have a pilot program to basically not pick up the trash unless somebody asks and what's resulting is people aren't asking and the trash is piling up across Honolulu and so a lot of people are saying what's going on with my tax money I thought I was paying tax money my property tax money to have you guys pick this up well this is our last cartoon now so David would you walk us through this a little bit so one of the challenges on this one was we needed to get a lot into a small little rectangle so so the idea is the politicians saying well we can't afford to pick up the trash and so you kind of have to cram the trash bags in around him with the flies and everything behind him and then your Hawaii resident asking obviously almost rhetorically where is my tax money going and then we have the money piles of money crammed up under one of the rail structures there that's unfinished and it kind of got into a separate issue but I think that we were able to get it all in I think so and it helped people get the bigger picture that if money is not going to meet the needs that we have that are immediate where is that money going it's obviously coming from the taxpayers but we're not seeing it produce the results we need Dave it's been wonderful having you on the show today well thanks for having us as well this has been great and let me just tell the audience that if you want to see more of these cartoons on the weekly release of the cartoon just go to our website and sign up at www.grassrootinstitute.org that's grassroot not with an S it's grassrootinstitute.org and you can just sign up and get these cartoons sent to you every single week we're going to close with one in the background and that's the final cartoon here as I'm talking I hope that you enjoy this and I hope you'll be back and see more of us on Hawaii Together podcast network until next time Aloha