RUSH: In Hawaii they have had a quarantine. No tourism for two or three months now. If you go to Hawaii from the mainland, the first thing that happens, they are told that you’re coming, they have an official meet you when you get off the plane at the airport and they know what hotel you’re staying at, and they follow you and make sure you go there and you have to stay quarantined for two weeks.
You can’t leave your hotel room for two weeks. So nobody’s going. Why should you when the hotels are not open? They have been closed since March. Hawaii is total tourism. That’s its business. That is its lifeblood. And there hasn’t been any because the Hawaii state government has not allowed any.
So a month or so ago the government of Hawaii announced they were gonna open up on August 1st. This led to a lot of people investing a lot of money getting their businesses, like their hotels and their restaurants and their bars and their strip clubs and the pole dancers and all that, ready to go for the new arrival of tourists. They spent a lot of money. People have invested millions of dollars getting their dormant hotels ready to go, polishing the poles in the pole dance places, making sure that the lap dances can occur in a pristine, disinfected way. And then the state came along and announced, nope, sorry, we’re extending the lockdown to September 1st.
So now people are out millions of dollars that they’ve invested in an August 1st reopen. Now, stop and think, if you own a hotel property in Waikiki or if you happen to own any kind of investment like a hotel property in the Kahala district of Oahu, which is on the southeastern side of Diamond Head, folks, they’re breaking people.
The state government in Hawaii is destroying itself. It’s destroying the tourism. Now they claim they got great success to show for this. They got a very low count on the number of infections. They got very, very low count on the number of cases. They got a very, very low count on the number of deaths. But the deaths of businesses…
And Hawaii is a set of islands right out there in the South Pacific. They don’t have any natural resources except for pineapples and coconuts, which is okay for pina coladas. Macadamia nuts, coffee. But no oil. They have to have shipments of oil and food that arrive every day to all those islands. And they come in various ways. They come in cargo aircraft. They come in by oceangoing vessel. Meaning, if anything happens to disrupt the supply line, there’s not much in stockpile.
They pretty much use everything that they get. But they haven’t been needing anything. The hotels haven’t been open. The restaurants haven’t been open. I mean, it’s stunning to me. And they’re very proud of their low numbers on the virus and deaths and so forth. But I don’t know how the people that own hotels over there are staying afloat. I know that they’re major, major chains, and I know they have hotels around the world, but they didn’t invest in and build these things to have ’em sit idle for four months at a time.
How do you ever make that up? How do you ever make that back? I don’t know if the people in Hawaii, I don’t even know if they’re complaining about it. I’m not there. Kathryn’s parents lived there, a lot of her family, so we were there a lot. And my golf buddies, we routinely schedule golf trips in Hawaii because one of the guys is Mr. Hawaii, Mike Hartley, and loved it. Just absolutely loved it. And I just shudder to think what’s happened to the place now.
And the same thing is happening in every other state that is shut down to the max degree. They’re ghost towns in some of these cities. And you wonder, do these people running these states and these cities, to them is money something that just exists? It’s just there and when you need some you put in a phone call and it somehow shows up? I’m not talking about printed. Talking about how it’s actually generated.
I wonder this about the Millennial generation. Do they understand really where money comes from? Do they understand how you get yours. They don’t understand why some people have more than others. They just think it’s intrinsically unfair, that government needs to fix it.
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