Money has context only in relation to what it buys, and big numbers thrown at us — especially by government — often come with so much spin the context is hopelessly obscured. A couple of examples:

>> The Legislature, flush with federal relief money, gave the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands $600 million to cut its waiting list, spouting superlatives like “historic” and “game-changing.”

Hawaiian Homes’ latest plan would use the funds to open about 3,000 house lots, an average of some $200,000 each.

This reduces the waitlist of nearly 29,000 by barely a tenth. Significant, but hardly game-changing, and there’s no clear path for the state to serve the other 90% as people on the list continue to die.

>> As state legislators hyped this spending, the city tried to soft-sell a similar outlay to move utility lines under Dillingham Boulevard to make way for rail.

The Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation awarded Nan Inc. $500 million to do the utility work, the same amount as the Hawaiian Homes money when you include $100 million already paid to Nan from a previous contract for the same work.

With HART there was no chest-thumping about “historic.” Sensitive to public displeasure on massive overruns, the spin was to downplay one of rail’s biggest contracts with talk about how surprisingly low it supposedly was.

Same large amount of funds, different spin. You’d have thought it was HART’s sofa cushion money.

Context comes from acknowledging the lost opportunity from spending money one way instead of another and then seeing whether it still makes sense.

Rail was was shortened to a terminus at Ala Moana Center instead of the University of Hawaii because the $5.2 billion cost to Ala Moana was deemed the limit of what our tax base could support given other city and state needs.

Now the projected cost is $10 billion, and it’ll stop short of Ala Moana in Kakaako; to get to Ala Moana would cost $12 billion. The limits of our tax base haven’t changed.

For argument’s sake, let’s say the original $5.2 billion cost would have been worth a 20-mile commuter line from Kapolei to Ala Moana.

The big lost opportunity is what we could have done with the subsequent $6 billion in overruns attributable to lies and incompetence.

An obvious possibility is that $6 billion could have cleared the entire Hawaiian Homes waiting list.

This would have not only fulfilled a neglected 100-year-old promise and opened land for putting 30,000 Native Hawaiians into homes.

Its domino effect would have freed a like number of homes on the general market, lowering prices by lessening scarcity and making a major dent in affordable housing and homelessness.

This in turn would have freed money for other pressing challenges such as public safety and climate change mitigation.

Some will say it’s not that simple, but in basic ways it is.

Instead of spin on big expenditures, we should demand honest opportunity assessments that spell out what we get and what we sacrifice in return.

Reach David Shapiro at volcanicash@gmail.com.