Rescue California

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Transcript of gubernatorial recall debate

September 24, 2003

Page 5

that same period of time. We haven't gotten a 38 percent increase in highway construction and school construction. We're paying through the nose for this government to provide. And it's not hard to find ways to find a system that produces as little as California and costs as much. Let me just give you some examples. If we simply restored to the California government the same freedom that every family or every business has to shop around for the best service at the lowest price, there's about $9 billion in savings across all departments in that one reform alone.

MODERATOR: Let me you cut you off for a second. I'm going to let you continue. You've got a minute and a half, we're gonna try to get as many questions as possible, so wrap this up if you could, please.

MC CLINTOCK: Let me come to about $8 billion of specific cuts and then we'll move on. Six billion dollars can be saved simply by reorganizing the state's bureaucracy. That means abolishing agencies that duplicate federal functions, or that overlap each other's jurisdiction. As I said earlier, workers' compensation reform ... simply swapping our plan for Arizona's. That's about $2.5 billion of direct savings to local governments and state governments alone. That's about $18.5 billion without even breaking a sweat.

MODERATOR: Mr. Camejo?

CAMEJO: Look, we pay ... the average person in California pays about 9.2 percent of their income in taxes. The wealthiest one percent pay 7.2. If we just had the wealthiest 5 percent, who receive all the advantages of the great strides in the economy in the last 10 years -- their income rose 113 percent. Your income only rose 8 percent. Latinos actually declined 3 percent. If we taxed them at the same rate that you pay, we would now have a surplus in the budget. We're 27th in education, we were No. 1 in the nation in the economy. And Tom wants to cut, cut, cut. I want to put more money into education. I want a fair tax. On my Web site, votecamejo.org, we showed exactly how it can be done. How we can have a $19 billion surplus, and that means we can start developing affordable housing, we can make California the leader in renewable energy. These are the things California could be doing, and all they want to do is cut, cut and rip, rip over here on my right, and the others, I don't know what they do. They get all the money in the world, they spend it all, we don't know where it went. I'm calling for a five-year audit. I want a five-year audit to find out how we had a $30 billion surplus turned into a $38 billion deficit. Because I think we just don't know for sure how some good things were done. And let's say it, more money was put in to give teachers a higher pay, some steps were made in taking care of some of our infrastructure. We don't want to go back on that, but it was done irresponsibly. They didn't worried about the income. They were cutting the taxes on the wealthiest people while they raised your taxes. I want to reverse it.

MODERATOR: Thank you, we're going to have Arianna Huffington. How are you going to balance the budget, Ms. Huffington?