The Gray Davis Administration and the liberal legislators in Sacramento.
During the dot-com boom, the governor spent like a teen-age computer geek awash in his first paycheck from a computer company. Then the dot-com boom crashed in 2000. We might excuse the teen-ager's excesses as youthful folly. But for adults running a government, we expect more.
The key figures to look at in the Tuesday numbers will be how much the governor borrows from other state funds, such as the tobacco settlement. "I believe he's going to borrow his way through this thing," Sen. Haynes said. "It'll be smoke and mirrors," Jack Pitney, a political science professor at Claremont McKenna College, told me. "He is going to do everything in his power to avoid anything causing pain in the year 2002. ... This will require a true feat of magic. Maybe he'll get Siegfried and Roy as his budget consultants." ......Other schemes being discussed include borrowing from the state pension fund and anticipating more federal money (good luck from the Republican Bush administration).
I expect that Gov. Davis' Tuesday budget revision will challenge novelist Stephen King, in both fiction and horror. But unlike the federal government, the state can't print money. All its general fund money comes from real citizens and businesses, or from loans with financial institutions that scrutinize the numbers. About the only way all this fiscal high-stakes poker game can work is if there's a new economic boom the equivalent of the 1997-99 dot-com boom. It's hard to evision what that would be. The borrowing the governor and the Legislature will take on in the next few weeks then will become a new, long-term burden on the budget. So will the bonds likely to be passed by voters.
OK so June is almost upon us and no bonds no power warrants, budget battles infront and this should get so interesting in an election year. I think that Simon should run on a simple campaign message, "do you like what the Democrats have done to the state's economy, do you feel more secure with your job, and if you all the democrats to remain in power will you be worse off than when Davis was first elected."