Entries for 'Tom Yamachika'

... The memo concludes that the State did not have the power under the Hawaii Constitution to provide for four extra HART board members.  Thus, we can basically ignore the extra folks and conduct business as if they weren’t around ....

... “Growing the Good Life Begins Here” ....

... “Those people have at their disposal so many ways to flummox the tax authorities if they want to. Panamanian bearer shares corporations. Dutch sandwiches. Entities from the Isle of Man, the Caymans, or Bermuda perhaps.” ....

... How does some bureaucrat sitting in the real property tax office have any idea whether a property is vacant? ....

... HB 862 makes no provision whatsoever for joint collection. The counties are on their own ....

... One fundamental assumption that has been made over the years by our lawmakers is that if you enact a tax, money will be raised.  What if that weren’t true? ....

...What you might not have seen is the difficulty the HART board is having making decisions....

... government not only taxes people by taking their money, but also imposes administrative burdens that waste countless precious hours of people’s time ....

... Bill 17 would allow the city’s Department of Planning and Permitting to record liens against property and then to foreclose on the liens....

... property may be forfeited without a court hearing, without compensation, and at times, without even a criminal charge filed against the property owner. ...

... rent for the property was $100,000 while subleases of the same property brought in $300,000 ....

... On July 9, 2021, President Biden issued the “Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy.”  There wasn’t much media coverage ....

... Does our government overreach?  Yes.  Why does it do that?  Because we let them ....

... HB58 “Enola Gay Frankenbill” really is dead this time ....

... Hopefully, the bad stuff will die and remain dead ....

“...the coronavirus pandemic has challenged the County to make many unprecedented decisions. One such decision was to reduce the Assessed Values of Hotel and Resort properties due to the catastrophic drops in occupancy experienced by that industry....”

... Taxing Income in the New World of Teleworking ....

...“Landlords are subject to GET on these amounts whether the payments are received from the tenants or directly from the agency that administers the relief program on behalf of the tenant.”  The same reasoning applies to income tax, federal and state....

... Some taxpayers on Maui are getting a nasty surprise this year because they didn’t do anything, and their real property tax rate doubled ....

... Government should be based on clearly written laws, and not on the unpredictable will of one or even a few people ....

... House Bill 613, another bill that has undergone radical metamorphosis while in our Legislature. ...

... “Frankenbill” House Bill 58 has cleared the Legislature and is on the Governor’s desk waiting to become law ....

... Income tax is a complicated enough subject already ....

... For many years, the counties and the State have been bickering about how much support from the State’s transient accommodations tax (TAT) they should get ....

... and he pulls no punches ....

... the report spends lots of time reviewing the Auditor’s recent actions involving the Office of Hawaiian Affairs ....

... our lawmakers are not stopping at just one Frankenbill ....

... assembling bits and pieces from cadavers and then bringing it to life using some unexplained method ....

... SB815 creates a “public education stabilization trust fund” ....

“...Confiscation in Paradise: Move to Hawaii, pay the nation’s highest state income-tax rate....”

... a kind of crabs-in-the-bucket argument ....

... Senate Bill 56, with the ominous title “Relating to Revenue Generation,” has been granted its first hearing by the Senate Ways and Means Committee ....

... “I am altering the deal.  Pray I don’t alter it any further.” ....

... We need to start recognizing that this “dedicated funding source” rhetoric is taking us down the wrong path ....

... Hold on to your wallets, folks, because this year’s great legislative adventure has just begun! ....

"... At the Legislature, committee hearings have begun in earnest and it doesn’t seem at all like we are in an economic crisis ...."

... Our unemployment system, as of January 8, 2021, has paid out $3.4 billion in unemployment benefits ....

... Ige’s Chief of Staff and former Director of Taxation Linda Chu Takayama told the House Finance Committee a little more about the revenue enhancement measures (tax hikes) that the Administration is going to propose ....

... “the carbon tax” is most likely the “barrel tax” ....

... There is still a lot of real estate between $0.3 billion and $1.4 billion a year ....

... possible unintended consequences ....

... “The following specific provisions of law are suspended, as allowed by federal law … Chapter 89, HRS, collective bargaining in public employment.” ....

... Developments during this COVID crisis have brought out tax scofflaws in some of the most unexpected ways ....

... The first problem is that some people think that the letter comes from a government agency. It doesn’t ....

...“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”....

... In a case called Timbs v. Indiana decided just last year, however, the U.S. Supreme Court made a couple of key points ....

...B&F basically told the departments, “Here’s your money. Go spend it.”....

...$2.28 billion within 257 accounts....

... The proposal is called Bill 80 ....

... the Governor issued a Fourteenth Supplementary Proclamation, in which the language suspending the Procurement Code was radically changed ....