Schwarzenegger Flops on Tax, Budget Increases

This is precisely why anyone who argues during an election process that he will not raise taxes and will slash spending, even though his record implies otherwise, is simply not believable. And Arnold was more believable than Obama is. From the WSJ.

A big part of the problem is the Terminator himself. When Mr. Schwarzenegger ran for Governor in 2003 amid the last California fiscal crisis, he promised a new ethic of spending restraint, no new taxes and less debt financing. Six years later none of that has happened. Once California crawled out of that last fiscal emergency, Mr. Schwarzenegger made one more stab at budget reform, got clobbered at the ballot box, and has since given in and let the budget grow to $144.5 billion -- a 40% hike over four years.

Democrats refuse even to trim the budget. Neither they nor the Governor have proposed shutting down a single government program. Many California voters also seem to live under this delusion that government is free. The state has a debt of $60 billion and the worst credit rating among the 50 states. But in November Californians approved a $10 billion bond for a high-speed rail system that will add $600 million in annual debt servicing costs to the state budget every year until the middle of the century.

If California Democrats are so hell-bent on tax-and-spending California into the ground, why would anyone possibly believe that their ideological brothers and sisters in Washington will be any different?