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�鲹�������Բ��� will be considered  during this year’s legislative session. And while the thought of raising the minimum wage has provoked bitter arguments — both for and against — over the years, incumbent legislators have to face voters for reelection in the midst of an inflation that saw prices hike as much as 7% last year, the worst since 1982.

If the Legislature doesn’t at least try to raise the minimum wage this year, lawmakers will run the risk of looking like they didn’t do anything substantial to respond to the rapidly souring economic situation.

So, if you ask me, when all is said and done, they’ll probably succeed at passing a bill to raise the minimum wage.

To be fair, the minimum wage in Hawaii . (In fact, .) If you’re making less than $21,000 a year in Hawaii, you’re going to have to split costs with friends or family to survive.

But economic recovery is not as simple as government mandating that people be paid more, because the question is not so much “how much money do you make” but rather, “how much does your money buy” that determines success.

A few years ago, pre-pandemic, one legislator thinking out loud and off the record frantically demanded to know if I understood what the price of a chicken katsu plate lunch would be, hypothetically, if the minimum wage were $15 an hour in Hawaii.

“You don’t need to ask me that question, Senator,” I replied. “Because if the minimum wage is $15 an hour, .”

And that’s the problem that faces us everywhere, and not just in Hawaii. Just as a brief thought experiment, and not to be rude to anyone, say for example that we were to determine that in order to have a minimum level of stability, everyone in Hawaii needed to make $96,000 a year.

Instead of playing around with small numbers, ? The answer, of course, would be that if everyone made $100,000 or more, $100,000 would be meaningless because then all prices would adjust accordingly higher.

As the late economist Murray Rothbard once wrote explaining this concept, “Society is no better off than before, since real resources, labor, capital goods, natural resources, productivity, have not changed at all.”

What really needs to be addressed is the purchasing power of money, not just the amount of money in one’s pocket. Because if we can lower the price of the infamous chicken katsu plate lunch – along with the price of rent, health care, fuel, clothing, and so on – that will provide more meaningful change than just raising people’s pay only for them to discover they still can’t afford the things they need because of inflation.

Truth be told, we’re facing a bad situation right now, and a lot of the problems Hawaii residents will face in 2022 are out of our hands. We can’t control the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy or the U.S. trade policy, two big factors that are hurting our local wallets. Worse times are coming, but there are small changes we can make at the local level that will have big benefits for low-income earners.

When I was a teenager in Texas in the mid-1990s, my friends and I worked for minimum wage and took whatever side gigs we could find for extra cash, whether it was cutting grass, working concessions at a football game, or washing cars. My best friend Josh got a job as an overnight safety officer at a warehouse, and because he got into so many fights with his stepfather at home, he decided to get his own apartment.

Looking back now, it seems almost impossible that in 1998, my friend was paid minimum wage, but was still able to pay for an apartment, have Sprint PCS cell phone service, and have money left over for food and other expenses. But then again, Texas had no income tax, and further, like milk, eggs, fruits, vegetables, and so on. That means working poor people have a little extra money in their pockets, and it also means that businesses have lower production costs, which makes everything cheaper all around.

The best way to make life in Hawaii less egregious for low-income residents is to lower the costs of the things they need. If we had no general excise tax, for example, many things in Hawaii would be considerably cheaper to produce and buy, and small businesses would have more money to hire more workers.

If we had no state income tax, or if we exempted middle to lower income earners from that tax, the extra couple thousand dollars that people would have in their pockets would be more money overall not just for consumer spending but to enable them to invest in wealth generation. What would you do if you got to keep $5,000 more of your pay?

It’s important to give people pay that keeps pace with inflation, yes, but it is even more critical to let people keep more of the money they make. As I have repeatedly said before, our current method of paying for local government is unsustainable.

So yes, let’s please talk about raising the minimum wage in the days to come at the Legislature. But let’s also talk about making the money that people make count by reducing local taxes, fees, and the overall cost of compliance to all the laws here in Hawaii.