Posted on 10/04/2005 9:11:47 AM PDT by NormsRevenge
Intellectual dishonesty is a peculiar form of hypocrisy - using carefully selected bits of data and impressive-sounding analytic techniques to "prove" something that is essentially a bit of propaganda.
Not surprisingly, intellectual dishonesty abounds in politics, whose practitioners are primarily interested in winning, not making well-reasoned arguments. Nevertheless, the report on state government indebtedness that Treasurer Phil Angelides unveiled Monday may have reached a new nadir.
Angelides is the state's banker, and one would expect that he would feel at least some compunction about the integrity of official financial reports. But he's also the leading Democratic candidate for governor and has never been shy about using his official position to tout himself or causes to advance his political career, or to undermine rivals. And the new Debt Affordability Report expands on that practice.
Titled "Stop the Borrowing Binge," it's an attack on Republican Gov. Arnold's Schwarzenegger's fiscal policies masquerading as a sober statistical report. "The findings of today's report are clear," Angelides said in an accompanying statement. "Gov. Schwarzenegger's budget plan has put our state in a terrible fiscal bind. California's level of debt is far greater than when he took office 23 months ago and the state is facing deficits as far as the eye can see." And so forth.
But if one sets aside the overheated rhetoric and looks at the report's numbers, the reality is not nearly as condemnatory. They reveal that predecessor Gray Davis ran up $18 billion in debt to cover budget deficits (not counting billions more in back-door financing not carried on the books) and that during the two Schwarzenegger years, it increased by another $8 billion.
Schwarzenegger legitimately deserves some criticism over the chronic deficits. ...
--snip--
(Excerpt) Read more at sacbee.com ...
CA: Word war stretches across state ^
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1496393/posts
(Denny Crane: "Sometimes you can only look for answers from God and failing that... and Fox News".)
Walters is correct and Angelides is also correct.
Davis and the legislature did force the the state into a structural imbalance but they borrowed little money and the state had sufficient revenues to pay off that small debt ($6B). Davis and the legislature would have been forced to pay the debt, probably through higher taxes, and balance future budgets with modest cuts in spending but Davis was driven from office before he was forced to act.
Schwarzenegger was the mastermind behind the borrowing. Instead of cutting spending or raising taxes to correct the structural imbalance, Schwarzenegger chose to siphon monies from local government and borrow the rest. The reality is that Schwarzenegger borrowed most of the money rather than cut spending. In fact, Schwarzenegger borrowed money to increase spending.
"To do what Angelides has said he wants to do- balance the budget and give the schools another $3 billion a year - taxes would have to be raised by about $10 billion a year and the income tax surtax on the wealthy that Democrats have been touting would generate, at most, a fraction of that (or nothing, if actor-director Rob Reiner, a potential Angelides rival next year, gets there first with his own tax-the-rich scheme for universal pre-school programs)."
That's why we need Prop. 76.
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