We had a recall almost five years ago.  California had a huge deficit.  And soon-to-be-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger was promising to "Cut up the credit card."

In the March 2004 primary, Schwarzenegger, now Governor, was promoting the passage of Propositions 57 and 58.  Prop. 57 was a $15 billion deficit bond designed to refinance the short term debt California incurred under Gov. Gray Davis (with a few billion left over for future needs, the last $3 billion of which was borrowed a few months ago).  Prop. 58 was a supposed spending cap of which Schwarzenegger said, "By voting yes on Proposition 58, you are basically taking the credit cards, cutting them up and throwing them away so that the politicians over there (at the Capitol), those big spenders, will never ever get the state into this kind of trouble again."  Yea, right.

Others at the time called Prop. 58 a ruse, saying, correctly, that it was weak and opened the way for more borrowing, spending and taxing by politicians.  At great risk to my own campaign for Assembly at the time, I was one of those people, with my main opponent using my opposition to the then-popular governor's borrowing plan against me.

With due credit to Schwarzenegger and to history, Prop. 58 was initially supposed to be an iron-clad spending cap that would have would limited spending increases to population growth and inflation.  Of course, Democrats in the legislature fought the plan, saying the cap was too restrictive because it did not account for programs such as education and public health, in which costs often grow faster than either population or inflation (that's the point, isn't it?).

So, the compromise Prop. 58 was worthless and here we are today, with government spending 40 percent higher than it was at the time of the recall in 2003 - $41 billion in additional state spending and a $16 billion deficit.  Schwarzenegger is again calling for a spending cap, and more borrowing, and now, a $5 billion a year tax increase, even though he promised never to raise taxes.

The problem with a spending cap is one of believability.  History has shown us that no spending cap devised by politicians sticks in California.  The question is, will earnest Republican lawmakers once again play Charlie Brown to the Democrats' Lucy holding the football?

As for taxes, California already has the highest income tax in the nation, the highest sales tax rate, the highest gas tax, and the highest corporate tax in the West with our property taxes being at the national average, combining for the 47th worst business tax climate in America.  Clearly, additional taxes in this time of economic weakness would make it highly likely that California would be the last state to recover in this present downturn.

Further, Californians are already stretched.  As the Los Angeles Times quoted me today in a piece entitled "Schwarzenegger proposes temporary California sales-tax hike to close budget gap:

Almost every Republican in the Legislature, meanwhile, has signed an oath never to support a tax increase. Assemblyman Chuck Devore (R-Irvine) predicted that Schwarzenegger's proposal would win no GOP votes. "You're talking about raising the cost of living on working Californians at precisely the time inflation is beginning to raise its ugly head," he said.

"The last thing that hardworking Californians need right now is, in effect, an increase to their cost of living by making everything they purchase, with the exception of food and medicine, more expensive."

To sum up, this budget battle goes to the core of the major parties' conception of the role of government.  Democrats believe in an expansive administrative state that ministers to all our needs, whether we think we need them to our not.  In this worldview, you can never have enough government and taxpayers can never pay enough.  Republicans, Schwarzenegger now apparently excepted, believe in a more modest government that does for the people no more than what they cannot do for themselves through individual effort, family effort, and community effort.  In the Democrats' view of government, even our 40 percent increase in spending since 2003 is not enough as their current budget plans are to spend billions more on welfare.  Schwarzenegger seems to agree.