Seems like the best idea most lawmakers have to fix the economy and save Hawai'i is to nickel-and-dime taxpayers to death until they've made up hundreds of millions of dollars.

Raise a fee here, hike a tax there, just a little so it doesn't hurt. Except all together, it kills. So how is taking more of our money going to help us again?

Many people are struggling. The furloughs proposed for state workers are painful, though many workers in private industry are seeing worse. Their unions suggest the state should raise taxes instead, that this would be a more fair way for us to share the pain.

Tell that to the laid-off hotel worker or the Aloha Airlines flight attendant making half her old salary. Who's sharing their pain?

The parking meters at the zoo serve as a metaphor for the whole flawed approach. Those 25-cents-an-hour meters were the one friendly thing local people could count on in that expensive, unfriendly zone past the Ala Wai. You could get ripped off with $6 ice cream and accosted by the silver man, but for four quarters, you could get in a soul-satisfying surf session out where you couldn't even smell the cloying coconut tanning lotion.

And now, to raise money for the city, the rate is going up to $1 an hour, which was a compromise because the city wanted it to be more.

Wouldn't be surprising if before long, some entrepreneurial crook sets up a table at the Honolulu Zoo to "sell" quarters, three for a dollar. How are people supposed to come up with that kind of change, especially those who make Waikiki surf sessions a regular thing?

Seriously. Is the city going to put in drive-through change machines? Will we have to fill the sand bucket with quarters like Vegas? Maybe they'll take credit cards.

Not that $1 an hour for Waikiki parking is exorbitant, but what's the one thing local folks despise about Waikiki? The one thing that keeps them from packing up the family and going down there to spend money and have fun?

Um, that would be parking. A day at the zoo will now pretty much clean out all the change stashed in your ashtray.

Raise the general excise tax to keep every state job, to keep state paychecks intact? That's more money out of pockets, and our pockets are out of money. Any spare change we have lying around has to be saved so we can visit Waikiki.