Dan Walters: Intellectual dishonesty reaches new low in Angelides debt report

sacbee.com

Intellectual dishonesty is a peculiar form of hypocrisy - using carefully selected bits of data and impressive-sounding analytic techniques to "prove" something that is essentially a bit of propaganda.

Not surprisingly, intellectual dishonesty abounds in politics, whose practitioners are primarily interested in winning, not making well-reasoned arguments. Nevertheless, the report on state government indebtedness that Treasurer Phil Angelides unveiled Monday may have reached a new nadir.

Angelides is the state's banker, and one would expect that he would feel at least some compunction about the integrity of official financial reports. But he's also the leading Democratic candidate for governor and has never been shy about using his official position to tout himself or causes to advance his political career, or to undermine rivals. And the new Debt Affordability Report expands on that practice.

Titled "Stop the Borrowing Binge," it's an attack on Republican Gov. Arnold's Schwarzenegger's fiscal policies masquerading as a sober statistical report. "The findings of today's report are clear," Angelides said in an accompanying statement. "Gov. Schwarzenegger's budget plan has put our state in a terrible fiscal bind. California's level of debt is far greater than when he took office 23 months ago and the state is facing deficits as far as the eye can see." And so forth.

But if one sets aside the overheated rhetoric and looks at the report's numbers, the reality is not nearly as condemnatory. They reveal that predecessor Gray Davis ran up $18 billion in debt to cover budget deficits (not counting billions more in back-door financing not carried on the books) and that during the two Schwarzenegger years, it increased by another $8 billion.

Schwarzenegger legitimately deserves some criticism over the chronic deficits. He contributed to them by reinstating a $4 billion per year reduction in taxes on cars as his first official act, and by giving ground to Democrats' spending demands during his first year. But even so, the deficits on his watch are a fraction of those run up by Davis, who - along with the Legislature - foolishly squandered a one-time revenue windfall in 2000 on permanent spending increases and tax cuts. The real damage was done then; under Schwarzenegger, the budget is being balanced, albeit not as quickly as it could or should have been.

Angelides claims that he was just as critical of Davis' deficits, but one looks in vain for evidence of that on his Web site, which contains a data bank of past public utterances. He didn't begin to pound deficit drums hard until after Davis had been recalled and Schwarzenegger had been elected and, in fact, often advocated more public debt.

Angelides, moreover, has been accusing the governor of being too stingy in state spending on schools and other major programs. So on one hand, Angelides demands that Schwarzenegger spend many billions of dollars more, and on the other he taunts him to eliminate the gap between income and outgo.

And how would Angelides accomplish that feat of fiscal legerdemain? He doesn't say in his latest missive, calling on Schwarzenegger merely "to propose and the Legislature (to) adopt a balanced budget without future borrowing," but previously he advocated raising income taxes on high earners and unspecified corporations.

Does tax advocacy get Angelides off the hook in terms of intellectual honesty? Not at all, since his tax proposals are not only very unspecific, but are totally unrealistic.

To do what Angelides has said he wants to do - balance the budget and give the schools another $3 billion a year - taxes would have to be raised by about $10 billion a year and the income tax surtax on the wealthy that Democrats have been touting would generate, at most, a fraction of that (or nothing, if actor-director Rob Reiner, a potential Angelides rival next year, gets there first with his own tax-the-rich scheme for universal preschool programs).

We're left, therefore, with just intellectual dishonesty. Until Angelides reveals exactly what he wants to spend and how he specifically proposes to raise it while also balancing the budget, it's just so much mindless blather.