Losing weight is the No. 1 New Year's resolution, surveys say.

A fiscal diet would be a good pledge for local elected officials as we head into 2006 with the city sitting on a $125 million property tax windfall and the state fat with a $600 million budget surplus.

Political leaders who resist giving a share of the bonus back to taxpayers underestimate public frustration with a surging cost of living that is stifling Hawai'i's quality of life and driving our kids to the Mainland.

In the past year, local residents, who were already among the nation's highest taxed, have been suffocated by multiple increases in taxes and fees.

Honolulu property tax assessments are up an average 26 percent this year, much of it the result of outside speculation, continuing a six-year run that has doubled assessed values and sent taxes soaring.

A 12.5 percent excise tax increase is on O'ahu's horizon to pay for rail transit.

High gasoline prices that bloodied consumers resulted in tax windfalls that officials show little interest in returning, and beverage container deposits have yielded the state an $18 million surplus.

Also up are conveyance and vehicle taxes, bus fares and fees for parking, sewers, building permits, refuse tipping and park use.

The pocketbook blows are becoming so suffocating that even liberals often accused of tax-and-spend inclinations are organizing for property tax relief.

Mayor Mufi Hannemann dismisses calls for reductions by asking the few City Council members seeking to lower tax rates which parks and road projects in their districts they would cut.

The problem is that the mayor isn't proposing to spend all of the new tax money on roads and parks.

He'd use the biggest single chunk of the $125 million to establish a $50 million "rainy day" fund.

It's fair to question whether now is the right time to further burden suffering homeowners to stash money that won't likely be needed anytime soon.

It's fair to ask whether it meets Hannemann's oft-stated standard of need-to-have vs. nice-to-have.

It's a similar story at the Capitol, where lawmakers show little enthusiasm for Gov. Linda Lingle's proposal to return half of the budget surplus to taxpayers.

They argue that the money is needed to pay for schools, affordable housing and job training.

The rub is that those worthy initiatives aren't where all the money likely will end up.

If you read between the lines, legislators' main concern seems to be keeping cash available to finance hefty pay raises for the public worker unions that support their election.

Some lawmakers even suggest that under the binding arbitration law they unwisely enacted three years ago, the 40,000-member Hawai'i Government Employees Association could get the same raises of 9 percent and 11 percent that University of Hawai'i professors will receive in the last two years of their contract.

It's an outrageous notion; the UH raises were a special agreement to correct long-recognized inequities in what local professors were paid compared to peers at comparable universities.

Nobody has ever suggested with a straight face that HGEA's army of bureaucrats is similarly underpaid.

Public workers certainly deserve fair raises in a strong economy, but legislators must stop enabling unions to use their political clout to hog it all.

In the past decade, public worker pay and benefit increases have sucked up virtually all of the $1 billion in cumulative state revenue growth during that period, according to figures compiled by the Lingle administration.

There should be a steep political price next year if elected officials don't cease their slavish devotion to keeping public workers fat while everybody else suffers and pressing public needs go unmet.

David Shapiro, a veteran Hawai'i journalist, can be reached by e-mail at dave@volcanicash.net.