Is Arnold Schwarzenegger the most expensive governor in California history?
With his announcement this week that we will have a special election in November, we can add $50 million to $80 million to the bill Californians will pay to keep his self-image buffed. That's the estimate of how much the special election will cost taxpayers.
And it's on top of what he is costing us by having borrowed billions of dollars to replace the annual revenue the state once collected from the car tax, which he rolled back without bothering to find a less costly way to make up the loss.
If one calculates the lost revenue in his two years in office at roughly $8 billion, which was bonded out at 4.025% a year, the annual interest cost is about $322 million. That's a high price to pay for the huzzahs Schwarzenegger garnered for his crowd-pleasing tax stunt.
In his speech Monday announcing the election, Schwarzenegger called it "a fantastic bargain" that will "fix a broken system and save the state billions of dollars." Given his childlike enthusiasm, it seems almost cruel to point out the paucity of the menu he's offering voters. Here are the three main ballot initiatives around which the special election is designed:
* A fiscal reform measure that will make the annual budget process even more unwieldy than it already is.
* A redistricting reform proposal that can't reasonably be implemented before 2010, according to Schwarzenegger's handpicked secretary of state, Bruce McPherson.
* A measure that extends the period a public school teacher must work before receiving tenure to five years from two.
So we have one measure that won't do anything to improve the state's fiscal condition, another that can't be put into practice for six years and a third that will have about as much impact on the quality of education as changing the brand of chalk in the classrooms. (Two other initiatives have also qualified for the special election, and three more are likely to.)
Apparently these things are so crucial to the health of the California Republic that Schwarzenegger couldn't wait an extra six months to place them on the regular ballot in June. Instead, he decided to further indulge in personality governance by rushing them to a vote this fall.
