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Globalization has made it impossible to be an island sheltered away from the troubles of this world. Today, we feel in Hawaii the combined effects of global market upheavals, monetary policy problems, supply chain disruptions, the pandemic, and now, the impacts of Russia’s war with Ukraine.

President Joe Biden has already said to Americans that “defending freedom will have costs” – a somewhat tacky innuendo bracing the country, which is already suffering from inflation, . Hawaii residents have always had a tough time making ends meet and have gotten used to paying more as a price of paradise, but make things any more expensive here, and this place is going to be hell.

Over the years, our local elected leaders have been about as helpful in addressing skyrocketing prices as billionaire heiress Paris Hilton would be on a reality TV show episode that features her trading jobs for a day with a blue-collar worker. Our local leaders aren’t in office to actually work, they’re just there – in their minds – to be professional socialites who take pictures doing what looks like work, smile and post that to Facebook Stories with inspirational captions as eye candy for re-election.

“We can’t do anything about it because it’s beyond our control, but we will make a task force and write a report” has functionally replaced Ua Mau ke Ea o ka ʻĀina i ka Pono as the state motto when it comes to leadership. But with things about to get really bad for local residents, we’re going to need government to get off its butt and act aggressively to help those of us who live here.

Setting aside for a moment all the other things that are exploding in price, significantly higher energy prices as a result of the war in Ukraine will terribly affect not just transportation but everything else in Hawaii, from electricity bills to rice, all the way down to your favorite chicken katsu plate lunch.

We saw a similar, though not as severe, preview of this in the late 2000s when economic volatility forced state and city governments to dip into rainy day funds because the cost of energy had increased their overhead. Now, with everything going on, we’re going to have a big problem that is going to hit everyone real quick and real hard in Hawaii.

Forget for a moment pie-in-the-sky talk of sustainability and resilience and all the other policy buzzwords. We can do those things, but right now we need to brace for economic impact. We need to help our residents before things get out of hand. There’s a couple of things that we should seriously consider doing right now while the Legislature is still in session:

Implement an immediate work-from-home policy for all state and county workers and offer tax credits to private businesses that have work-from-home policies.

Average gas prices reaching $7 or even $8 per gallon will lead to biblical suffering for many Oahu residents. That may be an apocalyptic, worst-case scenario, but even if prices did not go that high, taking people off the roads would reduce both consumption of and demand for fuel. That means people will save money and prices for local fuel will drop. If gas is expensive, then the last thing we need is people driving unnecessarily.

The other advantage of a mass work-from-home policy is that partially or fully unoccupied work buildings can leave the lights off and deactivate the air conditioning, and energy consumption costs can be reduced. This is beneficial to everyone, and I’m surprised that we haven’t done this already.

Have a General Excise Tax holiday every month.

On the mainland, numerous states  when certain items are exempted from taxes. The theory behind a tax holiday is that it helps out ordinary people, and helps stimulate the economy. It would be easy right now to insert a bill rider into any number of the tax bills at the Legislature and drop in a provision for a GET tax holiday that could spare residents from paying taxes on essential goods and services for, say, two days every month until December 2022.

Aggressively deploy food assistance programs.

We should seriously consider reprioritizing our government spending to distribute food to those in need, particularly to the poor and unemployed, through much larger food-assistance programs. We already subsidize food assistance, but we should not be afraid to go big on creating mass public distribution centers where people can get nutritious food for free. And yes, the money exists to do this – our government just spends money instead on things that lead nowhere.

We can also do a number of other things, like convert public parks into community gardens and distribute fruits and vegetables grown there for free. But the point here is that we can’t just watch this crisis unfold and say, “Huh. That’s too bad. Lucky we live Hawaii” and do nothing. We need to act aggressively and decisively and prepare for prices getting out of control.

The late Mother Mary Teresa Bojaxhiu famously said, “The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread.” If we can mobilize our love for this community with action, we can get bread, fuel, and anything else Hawaii needs to make it through these tough times in abundance in spite of the economic instability. Believe it.