Why oh why can't we have a better press corps? The Sacramento Bee's Daniel Weintraub writes about how in last night's debate:
California Insider - No clear winner: ...McClintock demonstrated his encyclopedic knowledge of state government, steady and stable as usual...
"Encyclopedic knowledge"? "Steady and stable"? Let's go to the videotape:
Read Recall Debate Transcript: McCLINTOCK: That's a very important question. First of all, this state is already spending a larger portion of people's earnings than at any time in its history. We are not suffering a revenue problem. In the last four years of this administration, inflation and population combined has grown 21 percent. Our revenues are up 25 percent. That's after the dot-com collapse, after the car tax and after state revenues. We're taking in significantly more revenues than inflation and population. The problem is, we have a 38 percent increase in state spending in that same period of time. We haven't gotten a 38 percent increase in highway construction and school construction. We're paying through the nose for this government to provide. And it's not hard to find ways to find a system that produces as little as California and costs as much. Let me just give you some examples. If we simply restored to the California government the same freedom that every family or every business has to shop around for the best service at the lowest price, there's about $9 billion in savings across all departments in that one reform alone.... Let me come to about $8 billion of specific cuts and then we'll move on. Six billion dollars can be saved simply by reorganizing the state's bureaucracy. That means abolishing agencies that duplicate federal functions, or that overlap each other's jurisdiction. As I said earlier, workers' compensation reform ... simply swapping our plan for Arizona's. That's about $2.5 billion of direct savings to local governments and state governments alone. That's about $18.5 billion without even breaking a sweat.
One scary thing is that McClintock is almost surely lying to us: he knows very well that you can't cut California's state spending by $18.5 billion a year without imposing serious damage on health, education, infrastructure, and public safety programs. An even scarier thing is the (very low probability) chance that McClintock is not lying but is simply out of his gourd--and thinks that he is a good enough administrator to cut $6 billion a year in spending by simply reorganizing bureaucracy.
A second scary thing is that Daniel Weintraub is almost surely lying to us: surely he knows that claiming you can cut $18.5 billion a year in state spending without breaking a sweat is not evidence of stability and steadiness or of encyclopedic knowledge--but because Weintraub thinks he is in on the con, and knows what a Governor McClintock would do and approves of us, he wants to deceive us voters into thinking that McClintock is "steady and stable" with "encyclopedic knowledge."
And, of course, another even scarier thing is the (very low probability) chance that Weintraub is totally in the Gamma Quadrant himself--is not deceiving his readership in what he regards as a good cause, but truly believes that McClintock is steady and stable with an encyclopedic knowledge of the state government, and can cut $18.5 billion from California's annual spending without breaking a sweat.
Oh. And McClintock wants not just to maintain but to enormously boost state spending on infrastructure:
...a new era of highway construction, dedicating our highway taxes once again for our highways. Water construction, electrical plants, hydroelectric dams.... We have got to restore that dedication to our public works.
What a sleazebag.
Posted by DeLong at September 25, 2003 03:23 PM
Arnold has a secret plan to balance the budget! I see no reason to doubt him.
Posted by: Hackenkaus on September 25, 2003 03:48 PMOh boy, dueling Berkeley economists:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/25/business/25SCEN.html
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So if the electricity crisis didn't cause the deficit, what did?
Fundamentally, the deficit is a hangover from the days of irrational exuberance. California was the epicenter of the dot-com boom of the late 1990's, and tax receipts flowed to Sacramento. Tax revenue from stock-option grants and capital gains alone rose from $7.5 billion in 1998-9 to $12.7 billion in 1999-2000 to $17.6 billion in 2000-1.
When money flows in, governments find it hard not to spend it. This is particularly true in California, thanks to mandated spending constraints. For example, Proposition 98, passed in 1988, requires the state to spend 40 percent of general funds on education from kindergarten through high school. As a result, spending, both automatic and discretionary, rose in parallel with tax revenue.
Then the house of cards came tumbling down. Revenue from options and capital gains fell to $8.6 billion in 2001-2, and $5.2 billion in 2002-3.
Reversing those spending decisions was not as easy as putting them in place: much of the increased revenue went for education, tax cuts and other long-term commitments.
This brings us to the second lesson in economics: don't spend transitory income on permanent commitments.
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"...he knows very well that you can't cut California's state spending by $18.5 billion a year without imposing serious damage on health, education, infrastructure, and public safety programs"
Here's what's no doubt a very stupid question: Why can't you?
Looking at California state budget data I see that, after adjusting for inflation and population growth, spending increased by $25 billion in just the last three years. (That's more than an adusted 20%.)
Did the quality of health care, education, infrastructure, and public safety programs go up so greatly in those three years?
So much so that nobody could ever imagine going even 75% of the way back to those dark ages?