Flashback to the Gray Davis recall campaign. Arnold Schwarzenegger runs on a platform of fiscal responsibility, bashing the democrats for their tax-and-spend ways. His most prominent quote:
“From the time they get up in the morning and flush the toilet, they’re taxed. Then they go and get the cup of coffee, they’re taxed…This goes on all day long. Tax, tax, tax.”
Arnold says that he will BALANCE THE BUDGET WITHOUT RAISING TAXES. Furthermore, he says he can do it JUST by cutting waste from the state government. He promises to “open the books” and audit California’s finances, and pledges that he will eliminate the crushing debt solely by cutting waste. Anybody else remember this? I sure do.
So what did I read in the Los Angeles Times last week? He’s now considering raising taxes. Not really surprising to me, since what he was proposing in the campaign was obviously impossible. But what DOES surprise me is that apparently a majority of Californians are O.K. with that. This guy ran entirely on a campaign of NO tax increases and promises of balancing the budget, and now the folks who elected him don’t seem to care if it was all absolute fiction. Where’s the outrage here?
Can you give us a cite about the tax raising issue? I haven’t read anything about in the SJ paper.
I’ve been pretty happy, although I haven’t really followed things in detail. He seems to making real progress on the workers comp issue, which was completely out of control. From everything I can tell, he’s done a terrific job of working with both Pubs and Dems. He got his bond issue passed by the voters even though it seemed doomed just a few weeks before the election. I don’t remember him talking about “openning the books” in the sense of showing them to the citizenry. I recall him talking about a detailed audit so that he and the legislators could figure out what was going on.
And best of all, he’s made cigar smoking a bit more acceptable!
In reality, the conservatives in this state don’t like what he is doing at all. A true democrat in a republican’s skin. Considering that he is thinking about raising taxes, mentioned that he might reconsider issuing driver’s licenses to illigals, took out a 12 billion dollar bond to pay off the deficit, and is still going to give local governments the money that they got when he repealed the car tax increase, he is about the best democrat that you could get.
In reality, it is doubtful that can he do anything else, being that he has to play within the limits of the CA constitution. Plus, he got a job that no one in their right mind would want anyway. IMO, if he gets re-elected, it will be due to the same reason he got elected the first time. He is famous.
Are we limiting this to just the issues out lined in the OP? In reality the only way to balance the budget is by raising taxes or cutting spending. Since a good portion of California spending is mandated, that pretty much leaves rasing taxes. Eh so? My biggest beef with Arnie is his absolute silence during by my count ,4 school systems heading into bankruptcy.
We’re too mesmerized by his chest muscles to think clearly.
Seriously, he received his votes in the recall campaign partly because he wasn’t Davis (with his liabilities during the power crisis), partly because he represented Hollywood glamour. Once he passed the credibility test–i.e., once voters decided he could plausibly serve as Governor without fucking things up too much–the rest was gravy.
His anti-tax rhetoric was par for the course for the credibility-free California GOP, which is why the majority of the Legislature, every statewide office besides his, both US Senators, and the majority of US Representatives from California are Democratic. But he got away with it because . . . I guess because of his chest muscles. (We’re not taxed nearly as much as he claims, we’re only about 19th or so among the states.)
Of course he can’t balance the budget without raising taxes. The budget gap is about $14 Billion; to think this is all due to waste is about as silly as the concept behind “Twins”. But raising taxes won’t be too easy. As the L A Times puts it,
About the only thing I can hope for is that fellow Californians are starting to realize that maybe we’ve gone too far to protect ourselves from high taxes, yet have no problem with feasting at the table of public spending.
I’ll work on it if I have time. I don’t have an internet cite handy. And I’ll reiterate that he hasn’t DONE it yet, but just that he’s now saying that he might.
Well I’ll grant you that at least he’s not lazy. He certainly put a lot of effort into that. But do you think it’s a good idea? A lot of experts said it was foolish. To me, it seems to defy common sense. If the problem is that the state owes billions of dollars, how is that problem solved by borrowing MORE money? What does that do, other than pass off the problem to our children?
No, I don’t either.
Right. That was his campaign promise. But he didn’t just say they would audit the books. He said he would BALANCE THE BUDGET by auditing the books, WITHOUT raising taxes. It’s becoming obvious that it didn’t work. It just bugs me, I guess, that he was SO ADAMANT about it, and so condescending to anyone who suggested that it was unrealistic, and so sure of himself, and yet now when it appears he was wrong all along, that it doesn’t seem to bother anyone.
He NEVER said anything during the campaign about a massive bond issue to bail out the debt. Why doesn’t all that baiting & switching bother anyone?
The bond issue was the big dealbreaker for me. After promising to solve the budget crisis, instead he just delays the day of reckoning. Of course, I find that dishonest presentations of bond issues come from across the political spectrum, or political grid, or whatever. But this one was a lot a bigger than previous ones, and will cause more pain for those who still live in the state fifteen years from now. Of course, that probably won’t include me.
The other disappointment is the gay marriage issue. He said that the supported equal marriage rights. But he didn’t support the city of San Francisco, and he also hasn’t spoken out against the damn fool amendment in a big way.
Well, as a soft-libertarian conservative, I think he is doing a quite adequate job so far, for the following reasons:
He isn’t Davis
He seems to be getting the worker’s comp mess on the right track
He is perfectly willing to bypass the legislature with issue they refuse to address, and go straight to the people
He isn’t Davis
He seems willing to get dirty working on the big problems we have, rather than just leaving the increasingly-factionalised Assembly to do nothing about them
At least so far, he has been willing and able to get deals cut with the powers in California to actually get things done
He isn’t Davis
He refused to get entangled in the gay marriage mess in San Francisco
As for the future, we shall see. I wouldn’t wish that job on anybody! If he can in any way break the sense of entitlement that people have in this state, and get them to accept at least a little common sense, I’ll nominate him for sainthood!
I’ll need a cite for that. What I remember is that he said we had to get a thorough audit done before we could **being the process ** of balancing the budget. I don’t recall (no pun) him promising to balance the budget in any particular timeframe, only to “get spending under control”, and making sure the economy was strong enough to grow out of the debt crisis somewhere down the road. And that was why he pushed the bond issue. That was to buy us time so we wouldn’t have to raise taxes.
I’m still mostly undecided, but leaning slightly towards “doin’ a good job.” I think it’s still too early to tell how the Schwarzenegger Administration will play out, but I do like his recent handling of the workers’ compensation problem. The tax increases I see as a necessary evil; California’s hole is so deep that there’s no realistic solution that doesn’t involve a tax increase somwhere, despite the wishful thinking of some folks. I’m slightly disappointed by his treatment of the gay marriage thing, but I see much of that as pandering to his conservative base more than anything else.
It could be worse, he could have lied about WMDs in Iraq…
No kidding? Am I the only one who remembers that from the debates? I promise I’ll try to dig up a cite for you tonight. Maybe there’s a transcript available on-line somewhere.
Well, I’ve done some web searching, and I haven’t come up with anything other than “Schwarzenegger hints that new taxes might be necessary” and there is ALWAYS a caveat in the article that “a spokesperson denied that the governor plans to raise taxes”.
There are articles showing polls that indicate most Californias think we need to at least temporarily raise taxes (they obviously didn’t poll me ), but that’s it.
Unless someone comes up with some real beef here, I think we’re debating a nonexistent issue.
Maybe I misunderstand you. I don’t doubt that he said the budget **could ** be balance w/o raising taxes, but I don’t think he said he’d do it any explicitly defined timeframe. When pressed about raising taxes, he something like “I can’t rule it out categorically… if there is some huge natural disaster or something…”, but he he very clear that raising taxes would be an absolute last resort.
What I’m disputing is not that he said he wouldn’t raise taxes, but that he said something along the lines of “I will balance the budget by X date [or within X number of years] without raising taxes”. I don’t ever recall him putting a timeframe on balancing the budget. He just said that it could be done. Maybe not even by him (ie, not during his term).
RE: mandated spending. The spending that is mandated is a percentage of the general fund, not a dollar amount. Off the top of my head, 40% of the general fund has to go towards education. And the taxpayers can’t decide not to pay for these mandates, since they–we–were the ones who implemented them in the first place, via statewide propositions.
(Also, I can’t think of any others besides the education mandate. Regardless, this does hamstring the government re: their spending priorities.)
), but that’s it.