2014 April GET Collections Still Down Compared to 2013

From Hawaii Senate Minority Blog August 2, 2014

Senator Sam Slom continues to urge spending restraints because of the slow recovery of the state and national economies.

The 2014 April General Excise Tax (GET) collections are still down compared to the same month last year, although slightly improved on March 2014.

The USA national Gross Domestic Product (GDP) numbers for Quarter 2 are up 4% in comparison to Quarter 1[2], although on an annual basis the GDP numbers for 2014 are relatively low at around 1.1%.

Senator Slom explains “For the short term, it indicates that both the state and national economies are somewhat improving, however, the improvement is only on a quarter-to-quarter basis. This does support that there is only a very slow recovery going on for Hawaii and the nation. Hawaii needs to be frugal in its spending of taxpayers’ monies, as the economy is very fragile at this moment, and both the state and the nation are cash poor.”

“To ride this slow ride out of recession, Hawaii needs to put away some cash reserves, just like our everyday families do. At this time, as the Hawaii Senate Minority has previously indicated, Hawaii is due run out of cash reserves somewhere between 2017-19 if no significant changes are made in cutting costs (or raising revenue), possibly resulting in a constitutional crisis of the unbalancing of Hawaii’s budget.”

[1] http://files.hawaii.gov/tax/stats/monthly/201404ge.pdf

[2] http://bea.gov/newsreleases/national/GDP/GDPnewsrelease.htm