Blog: www.kgmb9.com/howard

Four times a year DBEDT, the Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism, updates its official economic forecast for Hawaii. The spring update, just out, revises everything worse, but not enough to spell the "R" word.

As you can see if you're in the same room as the TV, the state was already predicting a decline in visitors but now the prediction is twice as bad as before. That still works out to 7 million visitors. The second number is one measure of inflation. The state thinks it will rise slightly more than previously predicted, but still less than last year.

This new group of numbers is more esoteric -- wage growth, real personal growth and gross domestic product, say little about your personal wages but indicate that the sum total of dollars flying around in the state economy will be more than last year.

Most of us can live with incrementally tighter finances. The real problems are for those who lose their jobs, and in the first quarter almost 20-thousand people did, up a third from the same time last year. Even this is a little misleading, since the numbers from the same time last year were the second lowest since 1991. More on our economy throughout the morning.

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