Boomerang_ Travels in the New Third World - Michael D. Lewis [75]
The experiment hadn’t been a complete failure. As governor, Schwarzenegger was able to accomplish a few important things—reforming worker compensation, enabling open primaries, and, at the very end, ensuring that legislative districts would be drawn by an impartial committee rather than by the legislature. But on most issues, and on virtually everything having to do with how the state raised and spent money, he lost. In his first term Schwarzenegger had set out to cut spending and found he could cut only the things that the state actually needed. Near the end of his second term, he managed to pass a slight tax increase, after he talked four Republicans into creating the supermajority necessary for doing so. Every one of them lost his seat in the next election. He’d taken office in 2003 with approval ratings pushing 70 percent and what appeared to be a mandate to fix California’s money problems; he’d left in 2011 with approval ratings below 25 percent, having fixed very little. “I was operating under the common sense kind of thing,” he says now. “It was the voters who recalled Gray Davis. It was the voters who elected me. So it will be the voters who hand me the tools to do the job. But the other side was successful enough for the voters to take the tools away.”
David Crane, his economic adviser—at that moment, rapidly receding into the distance—could itemize the result: a long list of depressing government financial statistics. The pensions of state employees ate up twice as much of the budget when Schwarzenegger left office as they did when he arrived, for instance. The officially recognized gap between what the state would owe its workers and what it had on hand to pay them was roughly $105 billion, but that, thanks to accounting gimmicks, was probably only about half the real number. “This year the state will directly spend thirty-two billion dollars on employee pay and benefits, up sixty-five percent over the past ten years,” says Crane later. “Compare that to state spending on higher education [down 5 percent], health and human services [up just 5 percent], and parks and recreation [flat], all crowded out in large part by fast-rising employment costs.” Crane was a lifelong Democrat with no particular hostility to government. But the more he’d looked into the details, the more shocking he found them to be. In 2010, for instance, the state spent $6 billion on fewer than 30,000 guards and other prison system employees. A prison guard who started his career at the age of forty-five could retire after five years with a pension that very nearly equaled his former salary. The head parole psychiatrist for the California prison system was California’s highest-paid public employee; in 2010 he’d made $838,706. The same fiscal year that the state spent $6 billion on prisons, it had invested just $4.7 billion in its higher education—that is, 33 campuses with 670,000 students. Over the past thirty years the state’s share of the budget for the University of California had fallen from 30 percent to 11 percent, and it was about to fall a lot more. In 1980 a Cal student paid $776 a year in tuition; in 2011 he would pay $13,218. Everywhere you turned, the long-term future of the state was being sacrificed.
This same set of facts, and the narrative it suggested, would throw an ordinary man into depression. He might conclude that he lived in a society that was ungovernable. After seven years of trying and mostly failing to run California, Schwarzenegger is persuasively not depressed. “You have to realize the thing was so much fun!” he says. “We had a great time! There were times of frustration. There were times of disappointment. But if you want to live rather than just exist, you want the drama.” As we roll to a stop very