Orange County Register

In my ongoing series of Q&As with gubernatorial candidates, I sat down with Tom Campbell this morning at the Chapman Coffee House in Orange. Campbell is among the most gentlemanly of candidates, declining to discuss his opponents and focusing on issues.

He’s also one of the most erudite. He has a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago and graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School. He taught economics at Stanford University, was dean of the UC Berkeley business school, and is now living in Irvine and teaching as a visiting professor at Chapman Law School.

Campbell has served in Congress, in the state Senate, and spent two years as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s finance director. Click here for Part 2 of the Q&A, in which he discusses his philosophy that education is crucial to the state’s economic future, for increase public college study body capacity, and for decreasing K-12 class sizes. Click here for Part 3, in which he lays out his plan for increasing jobs in the state. Click here for Part 4, where he explains his support for a constitution convention, his wish to put restrictions on ballot-box budgeting, and a prison-reform plan that would include shipping some prisoners to out-of-state facilities.

In Part 5, he outlines his plan for addressing illegal immigration, including having the state help bolster the border fence and sending the National Guard to help patrol the border. In Part 6, the finale, he explains his plan for providing health care to California’s uninsured, and why education needs a bigger proponent in the governor’s post.

This first installment looks at Campbell’s position on taxes and addressing the state’s budget crisis. If you don’t already see it below, click on the prompt.

Links to my interviews with other gubernatorial candidates appear at the end of this segment, which focuses on taxes, the economy, and his approach to politics.

Fellow Republic candidate Steve Poizner has attacked both you and Meg Whitman for supporting tax hikes. In Whitman’s case, it was she’d supported Gov. Pete Wilson and Wilson raised taxes. In your case, I believe he was referring to your support of Proposition 1A earlier this year. Can you address that?

I’ll just address the subject – I won’t address the particular candidates. Prop. 1A created a rainy-day fund. It was an important improvement in the state’s budget financing system. What we have now is a boom-and-bust cycle. We get a lot of money when the economy is good and we spend it all. When the economy goes down, we have to make deeper cuts than we’d otherwise have to.

So to smooth that out, Prop. 1A proposed a rainy-day fund which, unlike the current law, could not be raided. The Legislature could not appropriate it. Under present law, they can. It’s supposed to create a rainy-day fund, but they can appropriate it. And the governor doesn’t have to put money into it. He can declare an emergency and he doesn’t have to put money into it. Prop. 1A would have taken that away.

So those are the parts of Prop. 1A that were very, very good for our state.

Somebody in the negotiations over the initiatives – obviously, I’m not in government now so I wasn’t involved – wanted to ensure the support of the public employee unions for Prop. 1A. And so they said that the increased taxes that were in the budget – income tax and sales tax – would continue for an additional year. I think it was a year for the sales tax and a year-and-a-half for the income tax. I could be wrong but I think that was it, if Prop. 1A passed. And that was what the public employee union wanted. That was to get them incentivized.

The truth, of course, is that the increase in taxes had already been approved in the budget. So it turned out to be a very bad political calculus, because it allowed the critics to say that Prop. 1A was all taxes.

But this was a reasonable compromise to you.

Exactly so. And I thought the most important thing we needed to do for the budget was create a reserve.

Politics aside, would an extension of those taxes have been appropriate?

I’m not inclined to say so now. I say that because you want to make a judgment based on the circumstances at the time. But I would have preferred that we had a shorter time period of taxes and a more permanent process for curbing the rate of growth of spending. And I really don’t worry about anybody studying my record and coming to a different conclusion.

Let me point out that in the 102nd Congress, I was the single member least willing to spend money, according to the National Taxpayers Union Foundation. I was number 435 out of 435. I am a fiscal conservative.

On Tuesday, Steve Poizner issued his jobs plan, which had sweeping tax cuts. Did you have a chance to look at that?

I’m going to keep to what I said before and speak to what I believe as opposed to responding to any particulars others have mentioned.

You can seem like the scholar that you are, and remain aside from the usual fray of campaign discussion. You’ve displayed that already in this interview. Are we going to see you playing the game any rougher this time?

(Laughs.) I think the best campaigns are focused on the merits and discussion of the issues. I will be and have been very specific on the issues. Indeed, more specific I think than the usual candidate, particularly on budget matters – what I would cut and so forth. I will keep the debate there. I think it’s more productive.

But isn’t there a political reality of going beyond that debate to appeal to voters?

Of course there is. And I’m certainly not ignorant to that and I will do my very best.

Do you think, particularly with your economic background, that you understand the state’s economic problems better than the other candidates?

I believe I understand the state’s economic problems well. I believe I understand the necessity for getting jobs is fundamental to everything. For self worth, economic growth, a future for the next generation, the employment base has to expand.

We are probably going to come out of this recession behind the rest of the country instead of leading the rest of the country.

Long term, not only because of my background in economics but because of my background as a teacher, I see that the education system – particularly the higher education system - is a crucial part of our competitive advantage with other states and other countries.

So I would say that I do have a good sense of what the state needs economically, from having been the finance director of the state, from being the dean of the state’s best public business school.

At UC Berkeley.

At UC Berkeley – the Haas School of Business. The Anderson School (of Business at UCLA), of course, will contest that. I’m sure I’m going to lose some votes by having said that. But, Go Bears, and I’m proud of the Haas School of Business.

Click here for my Q&A with GOP candidate Steve Poizner
Click here to read my Q&A with Democratic gubernatorial hopeful and San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom.
Click here to see my interview with Meg Whitman. Click here to read about her Tustin town hall in May.
Click here to read my short chat in April with Tom Campbell and coverage of his Irvine event in April.
Click here to read my interview with Steve Poizner at last year’s GOP convention in Minnesota. Click here to read about his Irvine town hall in March.

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