Free Republic

It took nine months for the Capitol's politicians to gestate a state budget, and it's a progeny that even a mother wouldn't love. Like others of recent vintage, it's "balanced" with pie-in-the-sky revenue assumptions, back-door borrowing and Enron-like accounting gimmicks. Like its siblings, this budget is probably good for only a few months, just long enough for the state to float some short-term bank loans – and just long enough for Arnold Schwarzenegger, elected governor in 2003 on a pledge to end "crazy deficit spending," to leave town and dump the mess on his successor. So what's the next stage?...

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger today denounced Proposition 25, which would lower the legislative vote margin for state budgets from two-thirds to a simple majority, and declared that it's a back-door attempt to make it easier to raise taxes. Schwarzenegger,speaking to a business group in Goleta, responded "absolutely no" when asked about his position on the measure, placed on the ballot by Democrats and unions, and then added, "I believe this is also...a majority vote for tax increases."