The Long Way

The Long Way By Samuel S. Kim Somewhere on the mainland there is a CHamoru software developer earning roughly three times what GovGuam would pay for the same work. He has family here most likely. He visits when he can. He learned to code somewhere—maybe in the mainland, maybe at UOG. At some point, he did what young people do when they are deciding where to spend their lives: he ran the numbers and the numbers pointed away from this island. They almost always do. He is not a

Most residents of Guam have never heard of General Headnote 3(a)(iv). That is understandable. It is a single line buried deep in the U.S. Harmonized Tariff Schedule, a federal trade document most people have no reason to read.

Between 2010 and 2020, Guam lost 5,522 residents—a 3.5 percent decline, while most American communities were growing. School enrollment dropped 15 percent at the elementary level and 16 percent at middle schools. These are real families who weighed the cost of staying and chose to leave.

The fix isn’t more money; it’s a flashlight By Samuel S. Kim There is a file somewhere in the Department of Public Health and Social Services. Or there was. When auditors went looking for it—hunting for documentation behind hundreds of millions of dollars in Medicaid payments—they found boxes that had been “relocated to storage,” databases nobody had updated in years, signatures that simply were not there. No drama. No villain. Just a government that had stopped keeping track

Legislation to create this exemption has already been introduced. The objection that businesses pocket tax savings rather than passing them to consumers is legitimate for across-the-board cuts — a targeted food exemption is a different instrument, with households and small food businesses as its primary beneficiaries.

Drive anywhere on Guam these days and one thing is impossible to miss: the billboards. They line the roadsides, crowd the intersections, and smile down from telephone poles in every village—faces and names, slogans and promises, stacked sometimes three deep, competing for the eye of every passing driver. It is no coincidence.

There is a word embedded in the very name of one of Guam’s most consequential taxes that deserves our honest attention: privilege.