The LA Times on Sunday had a spread on the candidates’ positions on the state budget crisis. It could hardly have been sadder. Naturally, Aaaaaanold refused to reply at all; that made his response easily the most straightforward and least insulting of the bunch.
If you, like me, thought that Peter Ueberroth was running as the adult supervision in the race, forget about it: he’s still promising to abolish unspecified “wasteful spending” and waffling about the need for tax increases. His newly unveiled “economic plan” [*] relies largely on a tax amnesty and asset sales, both of them irrelevant to the problem of getting expenditures in line with sustainable revenues.
Bustamante is a little more serious — he’s willing to admit that taxes have to go up, and even specify which taxes in a fairly sensible way — but doesn’t seem to be willing to tell the voters that there are good things the state could afford to do when the capital gains taxes were rolling in that it can’t afford to do now.