“Happy days are here again” seems to be sounding throughout the halls of businesses throughout the state as visitor counts and visitor expenditures fill the beds and cash registers of the visitor industry.
Meanwhile, across town, contractors are busy building, not only new housing inventory for residents to get into a new home, but they also are preoccupied with contracts for the construction and renovation of U.S. military housing.
Of course, retailers are smiling as those dollars flow through the economy in the form of increased consumer spending. Things are looking up, so to speak, but it seems like only yesterday when Hawaii was struggling in the deep doldrums of a decade-long slump that was compounded with the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack on America. How soon we forget, especially when the economy is in overdrive.
However, before we take that leap into the new sports car, we should stop to think about our economic struggles of the past 10 years and figure out what we can do to make sure we avoid a replay of those bad times. Now is the time to make some of those changes that we couldn