 Welcome to another thrilling and exciting episode of Hibachi Talk. You may notice that I am without my co-host and I'm without a guest, so what you have today is me, myself, and I, and we're going to talk about why it's so lucky we live in Hawaii. I got a little tongue-in-cheek view of why we're so lucky to live in Hawaii. So pull over a chair, grab yourself a libation, sit down and join us, and remember that when Hibachi Talks, people listen. So it's election season is upon us in Hawaii and there's a lot of opportunities for people to be shuffling around and I thought, you know, let me go down the list of why I think it's great that we live in this state, you know, and all the things that we've been able to enjoy as a result of living in Hawaii. So I have 12 ideas on what I think makes us special. There's a keyword here called sarcasm, so I'll make a note of that. There may be a little bit of that in this, but we can start with the ones that no one can take credit for except Mother Nature and whoever else. And that'll be reason number one. Now why is it great to live in Hawaii? You can't beat the weather. Now the weather is excellent. The beaches are great. As a matter of fact, on the Big Island, I think we have a beach that's ranked in the top, one of the top 10 beaches in the world. Surfing is great if you're a surfer. The water is warm. You can't beat that. But the weather in the past couple of months has not been that great, especially if you live on Kauai. The Kauai got pounded and Oahu got pounded in the past month and it brought something to mind for me. You can imagine how much easier it would be for us to get materials, services, and support to Kauai if we had the super ferry. We had the super ferry. It was able to transport goods and services and product and people to Kauai. But Kauai was one of the biggest islands who opposed the super ferry. So I'm just putting that down as the weather is great. Sometimes we have bad weather. But opportunities certainly could have been there if we had been a little bit more visionary in what was going to be happening in the future and how we could use it. Because if we ever get hit with a hurricane or a tsunami or any of those things and the islands that could use services that come from Oahu, we only got one choice or two if you want to count the airplanes and that's a lot of money. But the weather is great. The beaches are great. Surfing is great. The water is warm. The number two reason why it's lucky we live away and let's take a look at that one. Well, it feels like poverty. We have a lot of homeless. But the weather is good. And so it's not that difficult. But just to give you a sense, if you live in Oahu, you need to make about $150,000 per year as a single individual. That would be the equivalent of $75,000 per year. So take a look at that one. There are a number of homeless, I wonder why. Many people in Hawaii work multiple jobs. We've actually had legislators brag about the fact that many people in Hawaii have multiple jobs. As if that's what we should be doing, maybe we should not have multiple jobs and people should be able to take care of their families and spend time with their families rather than leaving one job and having to go work in another and leave these kids latched up and at home. So that's a bit of a challenge. But the weather is good. You remember that? And our pay is below the national average, despite the fact that our cost of living is extremely high. And one of the guys in here today said, I hope you remember talking about the high cost of living. Yeah, duh. Here it is, high cost of living. So that's reason number two why we lucky we live Hawaii. Reason number three. Now, before I get into number three, someone's going to say to me, well, Gordon, you're sick in here. You're being kind of sarcastic about what's going on in Hawaii. Why don't you do something about it? OK, weight gang, don't give that back to me. I came here with $500. I worked as an appointee in government for eight years and gave up eight years of a great salary to work in government as an appointee for eight years to try to do my best to turn this thing around. So if you want to come in and do that to me, then you come in and you give up eight, four to eight years of your life and you go work in the government and you try to turn it around. Anyway, reason number three to live in Hawaii, and I have my own business, and so I can certainly attest to this, is one of the worst places to start a business. Forbes always ranks Hawaii near the bottom when it comes to government support of business. Our tax laws are onerous on businesses, general excise tax that we have to pay constantly as business owners. They even track how much you make, and if you make more than they expect you to make in a particular period of time, they'll make you pay monthly rather than quarterly or semi-annually or annually. So there's onerous business taxes, and finding quality employees can be tough sometimes. We have essentially zero unemployment here in Hawaii right now. There are people everywhere looking for jobs. I don't care if you drive into Kailui, look at Target. If you drive into downtown, you drive into Alamoana. There are signs everywhere looking for people who are trying to hire. The labor unions need, or the labor companies need, laborers, technical people. I got a call today looking for three, see if I could help someone find three technical people. I mean, the shortage of labor is amazing. If they have to be drug screened, that causes another problem. I have an associate that works for TSA. They went on a hiring situation on one of the neighbor islands. They had 50 applicants and all but three. Three passed the drug test, three out of 50. So a little bit of a challenge there when it comes to those kinds of things. Anyway, reason number four why we want to live in Hawaii. What is reason number four? Oh yeah, here we go. Our education system. Our education system is ranked near the bottom when it comes to public school. The public school education system, as far as long as I can remember, has been marginal. In 2017, Wallet Hub ranked Hawaii number 39th overall and 43 for quality in all the states around the country. This is an interesting situation here because I'll go back to my comment about stat, hiring employees. You want to hire an employee and why would a high tech person move to Hawaii to work in Hawaii when the education system is substandard and the pay are below what they would make on the mainland. The weather is good to come here for the weather and maybe that's it. So it's a real juxtaposition because it's hard to recruit good talent to come to Hawaii if they're not going to be able to send their kids to a good school. Now don't get me wrong, not all the public schools in the state of Hawaii are bad. There are a number of them where the principals have just taken the bull by the horn so to speak and said we're going to go and do it the way we should do it and they're going to move forward with that and have improved some of the schools. Like Waianae High School, the last place in the world when you say Waianae in Hawaii, I say, well, why would that be any good? But that's one of the better public schools in the state of Hawaii. And yet you've got others that are more affluent areas that may not be that good. And this is, I think, a reflection not only of the school system, but the parents who participate are involved in what's going on within the school systems themselves. Okay, so let's take a look at reason number four why it's lucky we live Hawaii. We do have one of the best private school systems in the country. Our private school systems are ranked as, I think they're ranked number one in the nation. Duh, I wonder if it has anything to do with the previous slide on why we have one of the poorest. Well, don't get me with number nine yet, go back to that and keep me number four and then number five. Thank you very much. So our private school systems are one of the best. Hey, Obama came from a private school system here in Hawaii. So we've had a president of the United States that actually came out of the private school system of Hawaii. Now, if you want to send your child to a private school in Hawaii in 2017, you can expect to spend about anywhere between $15,000 and $22,000 a year per year per student. You have to have two children that would then move it to around $30,000 to $35,000 a year. That could be as high as $45,000 to $50,000 a year to send your child to school. This starts at kindergarten, by the way. This doesn't start at high school. This is starting at kindergarten all the way through elementary. This is equivalent of sending your kids to college. So that's a huge chunk of your gross income after taxes that you have to spend to send your child to school in Hawaii. So the fact that I mentioned earlier, you have to make $150,000 a year to meet the $75,000 a year level on the mainland. Add another $45,000 to $50,000 a year to that particular income level so that you can now sit at the $200,000 a year paycheck level. And by the way, our salaries are lower than the national average. And we haven't even talked about it, we're just going to cautious by a house here. So again, lucky we live Hawaii, the weather's good, the beaches as you can see are great, the water's warm. And now we have reason number six. We'll do number six and then I'll take a break and we'll do the ones after that one. Anyway, reason number six, and I mentioned to a moment, first time ownership is near next to impossible. If you are a first time owner in Hawaii and you don't have the backing of money from whatever opportunity, it may be your family, maybe you own the lottery, right, whatever, it's really tough. In 2017, the median price for a single family home, the median is middle. It's not average, it's in the middle. That's the median price of a home in Hawaii, on Oahu was $712,000. That's the middle price. So that's not the, you're not talking cream of the crop houses here. You're probably talking about a 5,000 to 6,000 square foot lot and you're never going to be right next to you within a few feet of each other. And a condo is about $415,000 and rents are off the scale. And you just do the math, you got about $142,000 to carry a $570,000 mortgage for a home. And that's median, again I'll say medium, in the middle. And $83,000 to carry a $332,000 mortgage on a condo. And let's not forget what the maintenance fees are going to be on a condo. Because the condo has to maintain all of those properties and those properties are more expensive to maintain here in Hawaii than they would be if, say, you're on the mainland. And then you've got, you know, Joe Cling said that, you know, apartments and rentals in Hawaii are off the scale. It's resulted in what's known as these monster houses that are being built where you've got individuals that are building these large homes with many, many bedrooms and there are like 12, 14 bedrooms in them to accommodate people giving them an opportunity to have somewhere to live, maybe sharing a kitchen, maybe sharing bathrooms and such. But it's causing disruption in the neighborhoods because of parking and a whole bunch of other things. And again, we're back to this housing situation that we have here in Hawaii. And then I go back to my first slide where I showed us that we have a lot of homeless people. Actually, I think we're ranked near the top in the nation as a number of homeless. But the weather's good and the oceans are great. So that's where we're at. So anyway, I've done through six reasons lucky we live Hawaii. I still live here. I will still continue to live here. I will still try to do my best to make some changes around here. But we'll see what happens as we move forward. So we'll be back in a minute after we pay some bills because they're expensive here. And we'll come back with the next six reasons why lucky we live Hawaii. This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. Match day is no ordinary day. The pitch hallowed ground for players and supporters alike. Excitement builds. Game plans are made with responsibility in mind. Celebrations are underway. Ready for kickoff. MLS clubs and our supporters rise to the challenge. We make responsible decisions while we cheer on our heroes and toast their success. Elevate your match day experience. If you drink, never drive. My name is Howard Wigg. I am the proud host of Code Green, a program on Think Tech Hawaii. We show at three o'clock in the afternoon every other Monday. My guests are specialists from here and the mainland on energy efficiency. Which means you do more for less electricity and you're generally safer and more comfortable while you're keeping dollars in your pocket. Hey, hello. How are you doing? Gordon of the Tech Star here. Welcome to Hibachi Talk. We're talking about lucky we live Hawaii. Toss my old back. Anyway, we're talking about why it's lucky we live in Hawaii. It's a little tongue in cheek. Look at what's going on. Part of the part because the election season is upon us and everybody that's running for office is going to tell us how it's going to make it even better than what it is today. So let me go quickly through the first six I did in the first half. One, the weather is great. Two, a lot of poverty here, a lot of homeless. You need to make a lot of money, 150,000 versus 75,000. Three, one of the worst places in the country to do business according to Forbes Magazine. Number four, we're near the bottom when it comes to public education. Number five, one of the best, best private school systems in the entire country. And number six, first time ownership is almost impossible. So I'll just add to that, how was I able to buy my first home here only coming in with a few hundred dollars? I ended up becoming a real estate agent. So I had a second job, became a real estate agent and the commissions that I used on selling real estate I used to help me buy my first home. I'm not a real estate agent now. But my intent was the only way I knew I could come up with a down payment to buy my first property was to be the agent that would be selling properties and as such taking those dollars to help me buy my first home. I'm a tech guy. I mean, I'm just, you know, that was it. Maybe I should have stayed in it, but I enjoyed it a lot and it helped me get my first home. Second job. Okay, number seven reason why you want to live in Hawaii and we'll bring up that reason. Number seven, traffic and roads. Our traffic and roads are ranked number two in the nation for the worst traffic. Oh, look at my spelling error there. Worst trafice. I didn't know how to, I don't know how to spell traffic. So we have ranked number two in the nation. Our traffic and roads are really bad. I mean, if you live on Oahu, the potholes are unbelievable, unbelievable. The average time spent in traffic in Hawaii is about 58 hours per year. That's average now. Average, not the middle, but average. So there are many people spending a lot more, especially if you're driving in from the wine eye side or the other side. You get one accident and traffic is backed up forever in either direction. So it's pretty brutal. We do not have a mass, we have a great bus system. We have one of the best bus systems in the world. So there's an upside. We have one of the best bus systems in the world. We're in the process of building a rail system that is very controversial, 100% plus over budget. I have my opinions on what we should do, but I'm going to keep that because, again, I try not to be political on any of those kinds of things. Certainly do it after hours and when we're sitting around having a libation or two and talking about it. Another thing that I thought was interesting is that we don't have a lot of radio stations. We don't have serious radio, so we cannot get the satellite radio. And so the good thing is though you've got your mobile device and you can pick up some of the radio stations on your mobile device and now the cars today, you can plug into there. But there are not a lot of radio stations in Hawaii. And I've always found that as kind of an intriguing situation. And I doubt there'll be many more based on the fact that we now have these technologies to replace it. Okay, reason number eight, why it's lucky we live in Hawaii, everything is really expensive. I mean, everything is really expensive. And I blame it in part on our tax situation that we have here. People go to the store and they pay a 4.77% sales tax and they go, wow, our sales tax is so low. But we pyramid our sales tax here. So we tax the product from the moment it comes in on the boat to the moment it gets to you multiple times along the way to the point where our sales tax is actually 16% or more. So we're a 16% sales tax state and we're a high tax state. We're one of the ranked top highest tax states in the nation. And here's other things we do. And this is where we start again, it's election time. But our lawmakers who are looking out for our best interests still tax medications, they still talk hospitals, they still talk tax doctor visits, they still tax services. We tax food and we have one of the highest government overheads because we tax almost everything. And in this just sales tax alone, we won't even talk about all the other taxes that are added like your payroll taxes, your income taxes and such. And then we have an interesting situation in Hawaii is that our shipping costs are higher than many other places because of the Jones Act, which has never been changed in all these decades. The Jones Act requires that all the shipping from the US mainland arrives on a US flag ship. That means we cannot use other ships. So a product that goes to Hawaii from China on a Chinese flag ship goes from here, from China, goes past Hawaii, goes to the West Coast of the United States, goes from that ship onto another ship and comes back to Hawaii. Why does it cost more? I think you might be able to figure this out. Just think about this whole kind of thing. So this is the kinds of things that are sitting there preventing us from having a lower cost of living here in Hawaii than we would say other city states or even countries for that matter. And so as I just said, is everything expensive or I just feel poor? I mean, it's just what it is. And I feel sorry for seniors like myself, not me, but seniors who are sitting now on really fixed incomes. I mean, I'm a senior, but I'm still working. There may be a reason for that, but there's that group that are sitting on just a fixed income. And when we keep moving the taxes around, property taxes are going up, all these other kinds of things. So again, reason number eight is really expensive here. So we haven't a lot of people leaving Hawaii in the past year. So we had a negative in 2017 on people moving in versus out. We had more people move out of Hawaii than move in. I wonder why. OK, now we have reason number nine. And this is a really good thing. For many, many years, Hawaii passed the Prepaid Health Care Act. And the Prepaid Health Care Act requires that businesses who must offer health insurance to employees who work more than 20 hours per week for four or more consecutive weeks. And this is actually one of the reasons that intrigued me about moving to Hawaii, because this Prepaid Health Care Act actually was something that no one in the country had. It reminded me of Canada and their health care policies. And so it's a very positive thing. It's a little bit onerous on the business side. But I'm willing, from a business owner, I'm willing to give that up in order to enable health care to be provided. But then here what we go and do, this is the one that blew me away, we spent $90 million for Obamacare to put in a computerized Obamacare system when we didn't need to. We had the Prepaid Health Care Act. We met the requirements of Obamacare. We did not have to go in and put in Obamacare in Hawaii. And that system collapsed and got shut down. But we spent $90 million of taxpayer money. And people go, yeah, but it wasn't state money. It was federal money, but that's my money. I still pay federal taxes. You still pay state taxes. And so that $90 million for a system that failed that wasn't needed, who knows why, we decided to do that happened. And then we have a shortage of doctors. And it's assisted in the paper a couple of weeks ago. Our doctor situation here in Hawaii now is getting, what I would think, getting close to borderline critical, especially on some of the neighbor islands. And I think one of the things that's in there that causes it, besides all the things I said earlier, but the weather's good and the beaches are warm, is tort reform. Our litigation situation here for doctors is terrible. Tort reform has been booted around for 20 plus years. It hasn't changed. No one wants to get off the pot and change it. And again, if we need to get doctors coming back here for more than just the weather and the warm water, we better do something in that space. Anyway, reason number nine. Okay, reason number 10. Surprise, surprise. We have the highest electricity. Oh, what a great new term. We have the highest electricity, it is an electricity. We have the highest electricity cost in the nation. This is an electricity with all the sun, with all the sun and all the wind and all the water and waves and everything. We're still burning coal. We're still burning oil here in Hawaii. And look at the numbers, they're just right here. Our national average per kilowatt hour, again this is average, per kilowatt hour is 12.84 cents. On Oahu, we're paying 37 cents per kilowatt hour for electricity. That equates to $334 a month on average for your bill. So add that 334 a month to your private school education that you have to pay for. And your sales taxes that you have to pay for come out at up to 16%. And here's what you got. This is it. So your electric bill is gonna be about $4,000 a year. And now, and as a result of this, we've coined a new term, electricity, and it is electricity when we have all of this. We have, which I find very unique, we have a, we have, I still believe it's still there, we have a one mile long coal conveyor belt at Campbell Industrial Park. The, the coal, the ships come in, unload the coal on this conveyor belt, it gets wrapped, and then the coal gets pulled all the way along to the cogeneration facility where they burn the coal. Now we do burn our trash out there, and that is a form of recycling, even though some people debate with me on that. But if you're burning trash to create electricity, to me that is recycling, rather than putting all of it in the landfill. Anyway, highest, reason number 10, highest electricity cost in the nation. Number 11, when you add it all together, and too bad I didn't do 30, I should have done 13 reasons, and this could have been 13. But where the 13th highest cost of living in the country, and I think I just said it all, there's a whole number of reasons why, and we're ranked up here as the 13th highest cost of living in the country. But the weather's good and the water's warm, so we gotta deal with that. Okay, reason number 12, and this is, again, you take this for what it's worth. I'm gonna quote Mark Twain here. It's a great quote. I've seen it in a number of places. I see it a lot lately. Politicians and diapers should be changed often for the same reason, Mark Twain. It's a pretty great quote. But anyway, another great reason that we live in Hawaii is the fact that we're predominantly a blue state. I mean, it's predominantly Democrat. Of the 14 presidential elections that Hawaii's been involved in, we've backed 12 Democratic nominees that have won the state for President of the United States. So again, on the upside, we've got all the blue happening here. The word sarcasm, don't forget that. For as long as I can remember, the state, House and Senate, has had a Democratic majority. So for as long as I can remember, I don't remember our state being any more than a strong Democrat, so we know they can get a lot of things done. Always know that we're gonna get a lot of things done. And then the next reason is, six Democrat governors and two Republican governors since statehood. I think our first governor was Republican. And then after that, we've had Democrats, and then Linda Lingle was a Republican, but then the House and Senate were still controlled by the Democrats. Anyway, the number 12 reason, if you're a certainly blue person and light blue, this is definitely the state you wanna be in. Anyway, that's my summarizing the 12 reasons that it's great and lucky that we live away. If you wanna comment on this or give me some more ammunition to help support why it's great to be here, please check us out on Twitter at HibachiTalk. Check us out on Facebook at hibachitalk.com. You can check us out on email me at hibachitalk.outlook.com. Yeah, send it there. And you can follow the show on YouTube. Anyway, this is a little bit of a change from our HibachiTalk shows of the past. Just wanted to give you a perspective on why it's lucky we live Hawaii. And when HibachiTalks people listen, and like I say at the end of every show, how you doing?