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[Arnold] said that when his council sat down and looked at the state budget, they were floored by what they saw.“No one … could figure out or make heads or tails of the state budget. We don’t know what is being spent and we don’t know where.
He wasn’t talking about the budget itself—he was talking about the documentation of the budget. He said:
One thing I have learned in business is you can’t make sound decisions with faulty information.
That’s why the first thing he’s going to do, if he gets elected, is have an audit done so that people can figure out where our money is going.
If that was the only thing he did, it would be a huge contribution, and enough reason to vote for him.
Contrast that with Cruz Bustamante, who evidently thinks he can fix a $38 billion deficit with $8 billion in new taxes and $5 billion in spending cuts. That doesn’t even add up. Cruz is offering only more of the same.
#1
As in business, there is an advantage to being an outsider (in this case, Arnold and also his advisory team.) Sacramento has had an Alice in Wonderland quality about it for a long time.
The Schwarzenegger team can approach the audit task without being vulnerable to criticism that they were part of the problem. They can look at the problem without also looking over their shoulders.
While in an ideal world our next governor would have prior governmental experience, it's not clear that even a seasoned Sacramento hand (especially a Republican one) would have much of a leg up in this area.
Finally, the cleanup process itself promises to run counter to many special interests. Again, someone with no stake in prior decisions may be freer to propose efficiencies that will be painful to legislators on both sides of the aisle.