Schwartzenegger campaigned for Bush, especially strongly in Ohio. Bush won Ohio and therefore the election. It’s not impossible to believe that without Schwartzenegger’s help, Bush may have lost the election.
So, perhaps Bush will show some favor to our fair state, even though the liberals here voted against him. or not.
It doesn’t hurt Bush nor the GOP to have California doing well with a Republican governor in place – it helps increase the odds of making California “red” state somewhere down the road, after all.
On the other hand, I think most Californians will remember that the Bush Administration was gleefully screwing over California before we got a Republican governor (Dick Cheney: “There’s no energy crisis in California, you people just use too much.”), so it’s not like the state will flip that easily…
I don’t see Washington doing us any favors in the near future. One of the first things Arnold said he would do was to meet with Bush and get us back all the money we had paid to the Feds. I never actually understood his reasoning on that, but I’m pretty sure that never panned out. I doubt Bush is going to help him now, even if Arnold did campaign for him.
Arnold is a moderate to liberal Republican govenor, about the only thing he shares in common with traditional republicans is his desire to lower taxes. That does not a red state make.
He seems to share a disdain of democrats… a tendency to calling them names… and also of acting tough to disguise issues. He seemed pretty republican except for these key issues mentioned.
What he’s referring to is that California gets back only 78 cents out of every dollar it (or rather its citizens) pays in federal taxes.
Here’s a link that sort of explains the issue. Look also at the section right below that for more background.
Bush is way too vindictive to do anything for us. I’m not holding my breath, unless I (a resident of the San Francisco suburbs) can get farm grants for the tomato plants I put in last spring.
Link’s not working for me. I do remember the thing about not getting back what we paid to the Federal government. What I didn’t understand was why we were supposed to get it all back, and if so, why we weren’t, and if this is a new thing, and if this is the case for other states as well. Actually, I didn’t even know that states paid taxes, nor what the point of paying them would be if we’re supposed to get them back anyway.
Oh, wait - I just saw where you said “(or its citizens)”. So Arnold was talking about Federal income tax paid by California citizens? Now I really don’t get it - If Washington gave all their tax collections back to the states, how would they run the place?
Sorry for the busted links; go to http://angrybear.blogspot.com/ and look at the entries from Monday called “How much money?” and “Stop Welfare”.
The issue isn’t whether Washington should give all of its tax revenues back to the states, silly. It’s that states should receive roughly the same amount of federal spending as their citizens remit back to the IRS. In other words, according to the posts I linked to above, California residents and corporations paid $227 billion in taxes in 2003 and received $36 billion in refunds, for a total of $191 billion paid; in return, the Feds spent $149 billion on California and its citizens. That works out to a deficit of $42 billion that year, or California getting back 78 cents for every dollar paid in federal taxes.
California’s state deficit was $38 billion that year.
What’s really . . . funny . . . is that the list of states that lose money to the Feds are, overwhelmingly, “blue” states that voted Democrat in the last two elections. (On that picture, New Mexico is listed as a blue state because it’s based on 2001 tax data; it voted red last week, and is actually the most egregious offender among all the states.) And the list of states that receive more federal money than they pay out are, overwhelmingly, “red” states.
There’s a lot of percolatin’ going on in some lefty blogs about making this a states’ rights issue, which would force the GOP to start cutting spending and allow us to mock GOP “welfare” states. Something to keep an eye on.
