Replies

And the plan was all laid out in the following excerpt from a 2004 article in the LA Times describing Arnold's Meet The Press appearance:

Schwarzenegger was asked about former Govs. Ronald Reagan and Pete Wilson raising taxes “when it came down to the crunch” to balance their budgets. Wouldn’t he do the same?
What followed wasn’t as much political spinning as outright truth-twisting:
“If we have an emergency and something unexpected happens, absolutely, I will raise the taxes. But I am not faced with those kind of emergencies at this point because, as you know, Pete Wilson, who was a great governor … had a terrible time in the beginning.
“I mean, here this poor guy went in there with great enthusiasm trying to fix the state, and here the $14-billion debt — right? — that he inherited. And all of a sudden he’s hit with riots, with fires, with floods, with mudslides, with earthquakes, with one disaster after the other.
“So this is why he had to raise the taxes because here all of a sudden the bridges and freeways were collapsing, buildings were collapsing. So he had to come up quickly with the money to make up for those kind of damages.
“So, otherwise, he would have never raised the taxes.”

The article does go on to refute each and every statement he made, concluding that the 1991 tax hike preceded any of the above disasters he cited and was only about the deficit.