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Sacramento Bee Columnist Daniel Weintraub

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September 30, 2003

What a Schwarzenegger budget might look like

Here is my column from today's Bee, in which I note that none of the major candidates has leveled with the voters about the pain that will be required to balance the next state budget. I could do another whole column speculating about what a Schwarzenegger budget might look like if he is elected. My early guess is that the only way out for him would be the federal government. He has already dropped hints on this front, suggesting that the feds owe us for the cost of serving illegal immigrants, and noting that the state doesn't get back anywhere near what its residents pay in taxes to Washington. And wouldn't President Bush, seeking reelection in a tough economic and political climate, love to be the one to bail out California -- and Schwarzenegger -- from a mess left by the state's only Democratic governor in 20 years? Republicans in Congress, eager for fundraising and campaign help from their celebrity governor, might also go along. At a minimum they could structure some or all of it as a federal bailout package, a loan to be repaid over 20 years.

If Schwarzenegger could get something on the order of $5 billion from Bush, $1 billion from the Indians, and $1 billion from a McClintock-style scouring of state government, and couple that with $2 billion in budget cuts of the kind proposed earlier this year by Gray Davis but rejected by the Democrats in the Legislature, he might be in the ballpark of a balanced budget. But without money from Washington, big money, I don't see any way he could present a realistic plan by January to balance the books for the fiscal year that begins July 1, 2004.