Tom McClintock: The tax terminator

Who is responsible for California's $38 billion budget shortfall, and does the state really need to raise taxes to keep from drowning in red ink?

Unfortunately, the "Saga in Sacramento" is just a low-budget version of the Washington extravaganza. The plot is so similar that Washington's big-time deficit producers would have a good case for plagiarism if they wanted to sue their low-budget California counterparts.

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Sadly, the mistakes made in Sacramento were repeated in most state capitals. During the latter part of the 1990s, the "irrational exuberance" in the stock market produced an unexpected windfall of revenues. During that decade, most states doubled their budgets.

The motivation for all this spending was not based on need, but on legislators' desire to soak up all the excess dollars. When the economy began to turn during Clinton's last year in office, they kept right on spending.

Last winter, the governors went to Washington with their hats in their hands pleading with "Big Brother" to bail them out but, alas, the national cupboard was bare!

Does California need movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger to terminate its deficit? Unfortunately, Arnold may be taking his cues from the wrong folks. The man who Arnold really seems to be clinging to for advice is former governor Pete Wilson, who had to learn the hard way that you can't tax your way out of a deficit.

In 1991, Wilson inherited a $3.7 billion deficit from his predecessor. With the economy in a downturn, he decided the best way to get off to a good start with Democrats, who controlled the state legislature, was to cooperate with them on a plethora of new spending. By the time his first budget was rolled out, the deficit had ballooned to $14.3 billion that year because legislators insisted on spending $10.5 billion more than the state was projected to take in.

In order to finance this excess, Wilson raised the sales tax 1.25 cents per dollar and kicked up the state's top income tax rate to a historic high of 11 percent.

The real live-action hero in this story is Tom McClintock – one of Schwarzenegger's Republican opponents, who at that time was a lowly state assemblyman.

McClintock refused to cover-up for Wilson. California is one of the few states that require a two-thirds majority to pass the budget. McClintock marshaled a band of deficit hawks together who held up the vote on the budget for weeks.

At one point, Wilson lost his cool. In a close encounter with McClintock, he backed his nemesis in the corner and called him "f---ing irrelevant."

Wilson eventually managed to pick off enough Republican votes to pass that budget which proved to be the disaster McClintock had predicted. Despite the new tax increases, general fund revenues dropped $1 billion that year and another billion the following year.

When the recovery kicked in, it was too late. So many California businesses had packed up and headed for the border, the state lagged far behind the rest of the nation.

By that time Wilson was so unpopular, he was booed at the next state party meeting and many wore "f---ing irrelevant" buttons.

McClintock, now a state senator, has spent his entire career studying California's budget and proposing practical solutions to controlling runaway spending and cutting the state's bloated bureaucracy.

He is running slightly ahead of the only other conservative in the race, Bill Simon, the 2002 Republican nominee for governor.

In 2002, Simon not only ran one of the dumbest campaigns in the history of man, he also angered conservatives by slow dancing with homosexual activists and caving in on the issue of domestic partnerships.

Meanwhile, in the race for state controller, McClintock – despite being outspent 5 to 1 by his rich Democrat opponent – lost in a squeaker by less than one percent of the vote. In fact, McClintock pulled in 103,000 more votes in his race than the well-heeled Simon did in the more visible governor's race.

If McClintock and Simon weren't splitting the conservative vote, it would be a three-way horserace to replace Governor Gray Davis between the populist McClintock, Schwarzenegger and the lone Democrat, Cruz Bustamante.

The conventional wisdom from Republican Party elites is that a true conservative can't win in California. You have to abandon your principles! McClintock has proved otherwise. In 2000, he won his senate seat by double digits in a district Al Gore took by a whopping 19 percent.

Just imagine what a real tax fighter like McClintock, with his background on the budget and a record to match his message, could do with Simon's money. Staggers the imagination!