There won't be any presents this Christmas for Isabel Mireles, her three children and two granddaughters.

Again.

"No, nothing," Mireles said. "It seems like I'm always coming up short. I still don't have a penny in the bank."

Mireles, 46, has held the same waitressing job at the Hilton Hawaiian Village for the past 21 1/2 years. Her education stopped after she graduated from McKinley High School in 1977, got married, started having children, got a job and ended up divorced.

This year, Mireles will gross about $25,000 and end up taking home about $17,000, which includes tips.

As the holidays grow near and Hawai'i's tourism industry is on pace to see a record 7.4 million visitors, some moderate-wage earners like Mireles aren't reaping the benefits of Hawai'i's hot economy.

They are facing higher housing costs because of rents and property taxes going up as home values rise. Most have had to absorb rising gasoline costs and higher energy bills.

"People are being squeezed," said Lawrence Boyd, an economist at the University of Hawai'i-West O'ahu. "So I don't imagine that a lot of people are going to be going out and buying lots of Christmas presents relative to last year."

From 2000 to 2003, the annual increase in the Consumer Price Index in Honolulu fluctuated between 1.7 and 2.3 percent, Boyd said, citing data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. For the first half of 2005, however, the CPI rose to 3.1 percent.

"Energy makes up 15 percent of that and housing contributed a third," Boyd said. "Those two things were clearly rising."

Boyd hasn't seen wages keep up with the cost of living in Hawai'i. And even with fuel prices falling in the past few weeks, Boyd says working people's wages are leaving them short.

"My sense is that especially for low- to moderate-income people, their wages are not keeping up with prices," Boyd said. "I know people that have put off driving into town from Kapolei because they can't afford the gas."

The October U.S. Retail Monthly report by New York-based investment research firm Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. LLC found that annual wage growth for the average U.S. worker has hovered in the 2.6 percent to 2.8 percent range, "thus far barely keeping up with inflation," according to the report. "The higher-income earners are still seeing outsized gains versus low-income earners."

The income gap between wealthy and low-income earners continued to grow from 2002 to 2003, according to a study released last month by the Washington D.C.-based Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

The group looked at Internal Revenue Service data that showed the after-tax income of America's wealthiest 1 percent jumped an average of nearly $49,000 in 2003. At the same time, after-tax incomes fell — on average — for the bottom 75 percent of U.S. households.

A report titled "The State of Working America 2004/2005" by the Economic Policy Institute found that real median family income dropped 0.9 percent a year from 2000 to 2003, a three-year drop of $1,500 in 2003 dollars.

For blue-collar manufacturing and nonsupervisory service workers — about 80 percent of the U.S. workforce — the average hourly wage fell 1.2 percent over the past year when adjusted for inflation, according to the study.

Beth Busch, the executive director of Hawai'i's largest job fairs, has seen local employers begin to offer higher wages as the Islands have enjoyed the lowest unemployment rate in the country seven months in a row. But wages haven't kept pace with rising prices, she said.

"In this economy, the price of everything has to go up," Busch said. "Are wages going up in proportion to gas prices and housing prices? No. I am not seeing skyrocketing salaries and huge increases."

As Waikiki's hotels continue to be filled this year with budget-conscious Japanese visitors and Mainland tourists who spend even less on average, Mireles has seen her tips hovering around 12 percent to 13 percent.

She works the breakfast shift in the hotel's Rainbow Lanai buffet restaurant, where Mireles understands that customers don't feel compelled to leave a 15 percent to 20 percent tip.

Mireles remembers the relatively free-spending days before 9/11 — and the years before the Japanese economy went bust in the early 1990s.

Back then, she would bring home as much as $400 per day in tips.

"On a really good day now, I make $150," Mireles said. "On a bad day, $80."

Mireles insists she has no bad feelings about customers who leave small tips, but "I find myself looking at them and wondering that it must be nice to be on a vacation," she said. "I don't feel envy. But I always think that they must have a nice house and I wonder what their houses must be like."

Mireles had been living in a $1,050-a-month apartment in Salt Lake that she struggled to afford. When the landlord wanted to raise the rent to $1,500 this year, Mireles moved into her stepfather's three-bedroom condominium in Mililani, where she lives in one of the bedrooms rent free.

But Mireles is now farther away from work and has to pay more for gasoline. What she is saving on rent is going toward back taxes, paying off debt and the cost of caring for her youngest child, her 15-year-old son, and two granddaughters, who are 3 1/2 and 18 months old.

Mireles' last big purchases were two new infant car seats — one for her car and one for her daughter's car — to replace the ones that the baby outgrew.

"They cost $49 each," Mireles said. "I bought the cheapest ones I could find."

And that left Mireles with little money left for things like Christmas presents.

"If I do buy anything," Mireles said, "it will have to wait until after Christmas. That's when everything goes on sale."

Reach Dan Nakaso at dnakaso@honoluluadvertiser.com.