Rescue California

-0

Transcript of gubernatorial recall debate

September 24, 2003

Page 3

What side are you taking, Mr. Camejo?

CAMEJO: I think both Tom and Arnold are both factually wrong here. First of all, corporations are now being charged the lowest tax rates that they have been for decades and decades. Their tax rates have gone in the last 60 years from 9.6 to 5.3 percent. In fact, Utah, Wyoming and Arizona, three states where the Republicans dominate, have higher taxes than California. So I want to ask Tom and Arnold to go visit those states and have a talk with them before they come and tell us to lower taxes when their Republican Party has higher taxes than our neighbors. People are not leaving California. They're pouring into California. This is a place people want to come to. We're right now hitting a record GDP. But we have too much unemployment because we're having a jobless recovery. That is, the corporations are making more money than ever before but not the people. We need to look at the fact that people are paying much higher taxes than the wealthiest people in our state or what the corporations are paying. I want to cut taxes on the majority of the people, but I want the richest people, that 1 percent that have more income than 70 percent of our people to pay the same taxes you're paying, the average person, so we can balance our budget and start moving in the right direction.

BUSTAMANTE: There are a couple things first. During the dot-com boom, we were doing about 7,100 new business startups in California. Today we're averaging 7,700 new business startups in California. The work productivity of the workers of California are more productive than Texas and Florida combined. There are problems, however. We do have a great economy. We are a $1.5 trillion economy, but we do have to fix this workers' comp issue. And what I would propose is that we do it much like we do the safe-driver proposal. There's no incentive for a good workplace and a bad workplace because they get paid or they get a premium that's exactly the same amount. So if we were to provide a worker a safe workplace discount, and we'd be able to have an incentive for those people who are not doing a good job to do a better job, we could lower premiums on those that are good worksites and increase the premiums on those that have the bad work sites.

McCLINTOCK: Let me do you one better. Let's just replace our workers' compensation law with Arizona's. Arizona's costs one-third of what ours does. Injured workers are being fully compensated.

BUSTAMANTE: No, they're not. No, they're not, Tom.

McCLINTOCK: And just replacing the systems, that's a two-thirds reduction in workers' comp costs, which not only lifts an enormous burden from business, but it also reduces direct state and local cost by $2.5 billion.

HUFFINGTON: First of all, you know, this is the two parties that brought us the broken workers' comp system. In 1993, you voted for the deregulation of workers' comp. And Pete Wilson was over there, your chairman. You can't just say we did that and now we're thinking something different because that really has been the problem. Workers' comp deregulation, energy deregulation and all the problems of this past are now coming to haunt us, and there has to be some accountability, Cruz.