Orange County Register, April 9, 2006

Our next governor will be either a liberalized Arnold or one of two Democrats, none of whom want to face adult realities

When I was a teenager, and just starting to get interested in politics, I thought that society's problems were easy to fix if only our leaders had the guts to take on those evil-doers who stood in the way of reform. Poverty? No problem. You take from the rich and give to the poor. Environmental problems? Just shut down the polluting factories. Crime? Fix the poverty problem, and then no one will need to rob banks or kill people anymore. And so on.

"When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things," wrote St. Paul in First Corinthians. Part of being an adult means putting away childish notions, by recognizing that there are few easy solutions, that life is unfair and that government tends to be wasteful, corrupt and incompetent. It creates more problems than it solves.

Yet too many politicians are in a state of arrested development. They think the way I thought when I was a kid. It's all so easy! Government is like a magic genie that can give us anything we want anytime we rub the magic lamp.Maybe they are pandering more than thinking, which only proves that most voting Americans share these delusions.

But as bad as this phenomenon has become, in Congress, on city councils and everywhere else, it has never been as bad as what I've seen in California's race for governor. Here we have three major-party candidates - Controller Steve Westly, who is running against Treasurer Phil Angelides in the Democratic primary, and Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger - who share a similar idea: the more government the better.

I've written a good bit about Gov. Schwarzenegger's dramatic shift from right to left, the result of having gotten his clock cleaned during the November special election, when every one of his reform initiatives was defeated. The governor, who used to talk about living within our means, has gone on to propose government solutions to everything, including proposals for tens of billions of dollars in new bond spending to pay for new infrastructure and even a hike in the minimum wage, because we all know that government can magically raise people's standard of living by edict.

I've yet to write much about his Democratic opponents. Their main beef with the governor is that he is too pusillanimous in his attempt to increase the size and cost of government. There are some differences between Westly and Angelides, in that Westly is looking to gimmicks to finance his new spending spree whereas Angelides is at least an honest big-spender - he wants to dramatically increase taxes to pay for the programs, although he is less than forthcoming about what he will do about the state's structural budget deficit.

The two Democrats had a debate last week in Los Angeles over how to fix public education. A news story in the Sacramento Bee captured the night's silliness: "Steve Westly ... promised to raise K-12 funding by changing the payout formula for the California Lottery to offer a smaller percentage in prizes for lottery ticket buyers and a larger share of revenues for schools. Phil Angelides ... sold his plan to tax high-income earners and close corporate tax loopholes to pay for training and recruiting more teachers ... ."

They were in Los Angeles, home of perhaps the most incompetent school district in the country, and no one talked about reforms or other ways to fix the schools. Los Angeles Unified School District spends more than $11,000 per pupil per year, according to the Pacific Research Institute, yet the mayor and school officials are now arguing over whether the dropout rate is one out of two students, or one out of four.

Even a kid would know that the problems go deeper than money.

Yet more government is the solution, according to these candidates. Schwarzenegger, of course, isn't any better, given that he, too, has abandoned talk of reform and now talks only about more bond spending to pay for the same old education establishment that always puts its workers' interests above the interests of the kids.

But I've never heard anything more childish than a proposal to shortchange Lottery winners to fund schools. And while I've heard it many times before, I've got to wonder about the maturity of any politician who wants to hike taxes on the "rich" or by closing loopholes. This is class-warfare rhetoric, which ignores that loopholes are nothing more than legal deductions that companies and individuals take to keep their tax payments lower. Big deal. If you don't like loopholes, then send in the maximum amount of taxes to the IRS and don't claim any deductions for your home, your dependents or your business trips.

By the way, eliminating loopholes really means raising taxes on small businesses and bigger companies that hire people, which no doubt explains why most companies are doing most of their hiring and expanding in other states, presumably ones run by adults. Angelides, who by most standards is one of those evil rich skinflints given that he earned $11.6 million in the last seven years, is just as bad when he talks about health care.

This is from his Web site: "Angelides finds it unconscionable that in the richest state in the wealthiest nation on Earth, one out of every five Californians lives without health coverage. Over the last three years, health care premium costs have almost doubled for California employees. Of the uninsured, 80 percent are members of working families. Angelides is supporting efforts to increase access and ultimately provide coverage to all California families."

Talk about refusing to wrestle with tough issues!

The first line is an emotional platitude, a meaningless statement designed to create outrage. The second line is probably true, but premiums are going up because the cost of health care is going up. That's the result of baby boomers retiring, longer lifespans and a third-party-payer system that drives inflation. Liberals refuse to allow reforms designed to place market constraints on health care, and as a result end up with policies such as those Angelides promotes in the last line of his above statement. That is code language for a single-payer, government-controlled system of the sort found in socialist countries, where health care is "free" but you have to wait years for simple surgeries we take for granted here in America.

Westly isn't much different. His Web site promises a cleaner coast, free community college for all Californians, a world-class public education system, the elimination of dirty air and toxic water, health-care access for everyone and "innovation in government," which is as close to a perfect definition of an oxymoron as one will find.

A Los Angeles Times article from April 1 adds a dose of rationality to the debate: "Three years after the fiscal crisis that set the stage for the California recall, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and his two Democratic rivals are paying scant attention to the painful steps still needed to overcome the state's chronic budget shortfalls."

Pain, tough choices, budget deficits?

No worries. We'll just keep spending money, increasing taxes and debt, and regulating more. The government can fix everything, and those who are opposed to us - i.e., the corporate profiteers who take advantage of evil loopholes - can be vanquished so that "working class" Californians can have everything they want.

Everything will be fine if only you vote for Westly or Angelides or Schwarzenegger.

Unfortunately, there's little chance that California's government will get any adult oversight soon.

Steven Greenhut can be reached at greenhut@ocregister.com or (714) 796-7823.