Not politics as usual

In Hawaiʻi, the gap between average household incomes of the top 1 percent of our population (around $797,001 in 2015) and the bottom 99 percent (around $57,587), has been growing—paralleling the rising income inequality in most other U.S. states from the 1970s onward, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

For this reason, I interviewed Gavin Thornton, executive director of the Hawaiʻi Appleseed Law Center for Law & Economic Justice, a nonprofit which drew my attention due to its unusual mission. Part of a national network of 16 public-interest law centers, Appleseed locally attempts to “build a more socially just Hawaiʻi, where everyone has genuine opportunities to achieve economic security and fulfill their potential.”

To achieve this, Thornton focuses his center’s team of data analysts and public-policy researchers on what he calls “high-level systems issues.” Hawaiʻi’s decision-makers, he thinks, need to come up with an effective problem-solving process so that various social groups and economic actors in the islands that have traditionally demonstrated differences in priorities and perspectives, can come together to achieve concrete solutions to pressing matters of socioeconomic inequality, especially regarding issues such as a livable wage for workers, affordable housing and a rebalanced tax structure.

These issues were underscored by the surprising (to some) data findings of the Aloha United Way’s ALICE report, originally released in 2017. The initial report illustrated the urgent nature of working-class economic struggle in the islands, revealing not only those beneath the official U.S. federal poverty level (about 11 percent of all Hawaiʻi households), but also the extent of families and individuals with slightly higher incomes that were “Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed” (ALICE, an additional 37 percent of all households here)—in a nutshell, the working poor.

Some forward-thinking political and economic leaders of the state saw from the report that [a total of] “48 percent of all local residents were struggling to make ends meet, and if you add a few percentage points to that figure, all of Hawaiʻi is done for,” Thornton explained. This motivated these leaders to rethink where we were headed, he said.

The percentage of Hawaiʻi households in the two combined income categories (federal poverty level + ALICE level) fell from the time of that first report to the time of its most recent version. However, since the economic impact of the coronavirus, Aloha United Way now estimates that 59 percent of Hawaiʻi residents don’t earn enough to cover the costs of a survival budget.