[EggsAckley]

I would say that the $35 billion question is:

WHERE DID IT GO ?

[Fitzcarraldo]

Entering office four years ago, Davis inherited budget riches. Now his task, much less pleasant and much more enduring if he succeeds, is to lift the burden of gyrating budgets from future governors.

Why don't they just report Davis is a colossial failure has no chance of repairing the budget? What we read here can be translated: "he will try, so give him credit now."

[Thud]

I think we should start worrying about an attempt to create a value-added tax in California.

[Torie]

What the editorial fails to ask is just why when the state gets windfall revenues from a capital gains recognition boom that it then spends, when the windfall ends revenues should in part be made up with higher taxes. That would seeem to be a formula for an ever higher tax burden as spending "floors" permanently ratchet up during boom times. That even in California is not sustainable, since it must compete with other states with lower tax burdens.

The clever liberal would try to get out of that box by having the feds do more of the spending, or shipping money to the states, in order to keep spending high while avoiding the interstate competitive conundrum. And that of course is the exact policy that is being avidly pursued now by the usual suspects. I have heard it from the mouths of the newly elected Democrat governors of Michigan and Pennsylvania, and now from Davis. And Bush appears to be on board, at least in part, with this "risky scheme."

[dennisw]

Republicans should just sit on their hands and let Davis and his crew of liberal idiots tackle this problem. RATS control the governorship, the legislature, judiciary, the universities, the educational establishment.

They wanted a one party communist state and now they have one.