SACRAMENTO — Former Gov. Pete Wilson famously -- or infamously, depending on your politics -- raised taxes to help tame a behemoth budget deficit. I asked him recently whether, 17 years later, he had any regrets.
"Sure," he replied instantly. "I regretted it at the time. I hated it.
"What I hated even worse -- what I thought was even more pernicious than raising taxes -- was deficit spending. I'd just come from eight years of watching the federal government engage in deficit spending. It is the ultimate slippery slope."
The Republican reminded me of his most celebrated moment as a U.S. senator. It clearly illustrated his repulsion for red ink.
Although he had just undergone an emergency appendectomy, Wilson agreed to leave his Bethesda Naval Hospital bed on a gurney, be driven the long distance to the Capitol in an ambulance and cast a crucial vote from a wheelchair at midnight for a deficit-reduction bill sought by President Reagan.
"I recall lying in the ambulance and feeling every damn chuckhole we hit along the way," he says. He was wheeled into the Senate chamber "with a big jar of something dripping into me."
For many years afterward, Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kansas) would joke: "We had to bring Pete Wilson in under sedation. He does better under sedation."
"It got old the first time I heard it," Wilson says.
It was a gutsy vote to cast. The bill, among other things, denied benefit increases to Social Security recipients and provided only an inflationary bump in Cold War defense spending. Wilson's vote thrust the bill into a 49-49 tie, allowing Vice President George Bush to cast a rare tie-breaking vote.
Wilson was a hero that night of high drama in 1985. Six years later in California, he was hanged in effigy at a GOP state convention after temporarily raising taxes by $7 billion to help fill a record $14.3-billion budget hole. He and the Democratic-controlled Legislature also cut spending, borrowed and used accounting tricks to mop up the remaining red ink.
"The predictable outcome was that it worsened the business climate," Wilson concedes of the tax hike. "But deficit spending is even worse." Besides, he notes, unbalanced budgets are supposed to violate the state Constitution. Nobody seems to pay much attention to that anymore.
