The economic team that Arnold Schwarzenegger introduced Wednesday is studded with prominent California business names, entrepreneurs and financiers who have helped develop such companies as Intel Corp., Oracle Corp. and Dole Food Co.
The tilt was decidedly Republican, and some experts familiar with the appointees questioned whether they would bring any less of a hard-line anti-tax ideology than such Republican rivals as Bill Simon Jr. and state Sen. Tom McClintock.
But team member Edward E. Leamer, a UCLA economist, supports tax increases and spending cuts to help restore California's credit rating. He acknowledged that this puts him at odds with Schwarzenegger.
As a group, the advisors are "very free-market oriented," said Lee Ohanian, an economist at UCLA's Anderson School of Management. "There's a defining theme: California's economy is overburdened with taxes and red tape, and it's time to put free-market forces to work to create jobs."
The 23-member panel, which Schwarzenegger dubbed the California Economic Recovery Council, is co-chaired by Reagan administration Secretary of State George P. Shultz and legendary investor Warren Buffett.
It isn't clear what role, if any, the team members would play in a Schwarzenegger administration, but their task at the moment is to help the candidate develop a credible plan for overhauling the state's finances and closing the $38-billion budget gap.
Geographically, the group has heavy representation from Southern California and Silicon Valley, but no Inland Empire members, nobody from north of the Bay Area and only one member from the Central Valley.
Besides Buffett, the business luminaries include David H. Murdock, head of Dole Food and developer Castle & Cooke; Robert A. Day, head of TCW Group, the huge Los Angeles investment management firm; venture capitalist Arthur Rock, a founder of Intel Corp.; and financier F. Warren Hellman, who heads San Francisco investment firm Hellman & Friedman.
Small business is represented by Larry Flores, president and chief executive of El Tapatio, a supermarket chain, and by Orange County restaurateur Carlos Olamendi.
The academics are mostly conservative economists with Republican political experience, including Shultz and Michael J. Boskin, a former economic advisor to President George H.W. Bush. Both are fellows at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, a bastion of free- market economics.
