Angelides’ unrealistic plans ignore the bigger picture

Gubernatorial candidate Phil Angelides has made many promises.
According to his Web site, he plans to spend more money on
education and health care and place restrictions on big business
while cutting taxes. At the same time, he pledges to end the
current budget deficit. Do not buy his promise: It is
big-government, Democrat-led, socialist policies like those
Angelides is proposing that created our current government waste in
the first place. Money doesn’t grow on trees.

Perhaps the most attractive part of Angelides’ plan to UC
students such as ourselves is the nearly $5,000 cut in tuition for
a UC degree.

This $5,000, of course, has to come from somewhere. That
somewhere will either be the state’s general fund or faculty
salaries.

If the money for the tuition cut comes from the general fund,
and if Angelides keeps his promise not to raise taxes while getting
rid of the budget deficit, then that leaves one option: borrowing
and letting the next governor and taxpayers 10 years down the road
clean up the mess.

If the money comes from faculty salaries, then the UC will have
a much harder time keeping quality professors and other educational
staff from going to private universities where they can make
$30,000 more a year.

Without quality professors, our quality of education will drop
and the UC system could lose its place among the top universities
in the world, making our degrees less valuable when we are out
looking for jobs.

The next most relevant part of Angelides’ plan to students
is the promise to index the minimum wage to the inflation rate.
Besides acting as a catalyst to a depression if we were ever to see
runaway inflation, raising the minimum wage would only mean fewer
jobs. Employers will hire fewer employees since they have to pay
each one more.

Another promise Angelides thinks he can keep is to require all
businesses with more than 200 employees to offer health insurance
to their workers. The money to fund this health insurance will come
straight out of the paychecks of those same workers, whether the
individual employee chooses to use the health insurance. The
workers will have that much less income to spend as they see fit,
and that much less to spend choosing their own health care provider
who best suits their personal needs.

We see a trend here. Angelides fails to understand that business
will not lose money just because the government imposes
restrictions or forces higher taxes on it. CEOs and stockholders
will not let that money come out of their own pockets. Instead,
they will raise product prices and offer fewer jobs, hurting those
same middle-class workers who Angelides wants to help.

Schwarzenegger provides a much more realistic approach. He is
not against workers or education. He wants to see us succeed, he
wants to see the economy flourish, and he wants to see healthy
Californians. He just has the foresight to realize that we cannot
base our plans on impossible budgets that will only end up killing
the economy.

Dunn is secretary of Bruin Republicans. He is a third-year
astrophysics student.