LOS ANGELES - With only days to go before he is sworn in as California governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger is leaning toward taking out a 20-billion-dollar loan to ease the budget problems of the huge and influential state, the Los Angeles Times reported Tuesday.
Quoting unnamed advisers to the action movie star-turned-Republican politician, the newspaper said Schwarzenegger saw the huge bond issue as perhaps the only way to meet his campaign promise to balance the state's budget without raising taxes or drastically cutting services.
Schwarzenegger, who is to take office Monday, would need voter approval for the massive loan. Because of the state's ballot timetable, this requirement would require him to get the measure through the Democrat-controlled legislature by early December.
The proposal is already being attacked by political opponents who said it will load the state with huge financial obligations and it contravenes Schwarzenegger's campaign promise for responsible fiscal leadership.
Schwarzenegger aides said the proposal differs from deficit spending plans that the governor-elect has criticized because it would be supplemented with a spending freeze and a constitutional cap on the growth of government.
Democrats, many of whom backed past bond measures, said the Republicans were being hypocritical.
"If [outgoing Governor] Gray Davis had contemplated a 20-billion-dollar bond, I could imagine the outcry from fiscal conservatives," state Treasurer Phil Angelides said last week.
Angelides said the bond issue would cost almost another 20 billion dollars in interest and other expenses over the 30-year life of the bond.
"It doesn't make sense to keep running up a credit card debt that will become due," the treasurer scolded. "There are real costs. It's not magic money."
Source: Copyright 2003 dpa Deutsche Presse-Agentur GmbH
_____________________________
Quis custodiet istos custodes?
"Who will watch the watchers?" ~ "Who is to guard [us from] the guards themselves?"
-- Juvenal's Satires, VI. 347, circa 110 AD