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GOP governor candidates tangle in Irvine
October 28th, 2009, 9:41 pm · 28 Comments · posted by Martin Wisckol, Politics reporter
Billionaire former businessman Steve Poizner led with the swagger of sweeping tax-cut promises at an Irvine debate for GOP gubernatorial candidates this evening, while former state finance director Tom Campbell focused on the need for specific budget cuts to be made before slashing revenues.
The third leading Republican candidate, former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, declined an invitation to participate in the debate at Brandman University, a new offspring of Chapman University.
Differences between Poizner and Campbell were apparent throughout the hour-and-15-minute event televised by KOCE and covered by Twitter (#cadebate). Among the contrasts was their approaches to dealing with the state’s ongoing budget crisis.
Poizner’s proposed tax cuts consist of 10-percent reductions of the state income, corporation and sales taxes, and a 50-percent slashing of the capital gains tax.
“We will never balance the budget until we cut taxes,” Poizner said, arguing that lower tax rates would attract business and workers to the state - and prevent others from leaving. Poizner also called for a 10 percent reduction of government spending over two years.
Campbell criticized Poizner, the state’s insurance commissioner, for not providing specifics of where the cuts would be made, pointed to his own detailed plan for $15.4 billion in cuts for last May’s budget, and says he’s come up with another $8 billion to $12 billion in cuts to address upcoming shortfalls.
“I think we should cut spending before cutting taxes,” said Campbell, a former congressman and UC Berkeley business school dean who now teaches at Chapman School of Law. “Otherwise you run the risk of increasing the deficit…. Let’s do the hard stuff first.”
Campbell said businesses are over-regulated and laid out a plan to address that issue as a way to make things easier for businesses in the state. He offered no apologies for his support of a 32-cent, one-year gas tax to avoid K-12 education cuts.
A recent Field Poll showed former Gov. Jerry Brown at least 20 percentage points ahead of any declared candidate, Democrat or Republican. Whitman (22 percent) and Campbell (20 percent) were neck and neck for the Republican nomination, with Poizner trailing (9 percent). Like Poizner, Whitman has millions of her own money she can pour into the campaign, while Campbell is mostly limited to spending what donors give him.
Other differences between the candidates at the debate:
* Campbell supported an open primary - where any voter can vote for any candidate regardless of party affiliation - saying it would have a moderating effect on candidates and minimize the primary election pandering. Poizner disagreed, saying party’s should be able to pick their nominees.
* Poizner said the state needs to build more prisons to address the prison crisis, while Campbell said the state should ship prisoners to the numerous states with excess prison space and lower prison costs.
* Campbell said the state should finish building the Mexico border fence if the federal government won’t, and said National Guard should be deployed to help protect the border. Poizner said he would send not only the National Guard, but the California Highway Patrol and, he joked, Sacramento Bee politics columnist Dan Walters if necessary. Walters was among panelists asking questions.
Related articles:
Field Poll: Brown way out front in governor’s race
Columnist attacks Whitman’s budget math
My Q&A with Meg Whitman
My Q&A with Tom Campbell
My Q&A with Steve Poizner
My Q&A with Gavin Newsom
GOP candidate hopes to outrun the ghost of voting past
Democrats in background of 3 GOP governor candidates
Governor candidates wary of citizens’ power
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DENA BUNIS, Washington bureau chief, 202-628-6381 or dbunis@ocregister.com
CHRIS KNAP, Politics team leader, 714-796-2240 or cknap@ocregister.com
BRIAN JOSEPH, Sacramento correspondent, 916-449-6046 or bjoseph@ocregister.com
JENNIFER MUIR, County government reporter, 714-796-7813 or jmuir@ocregister.com
MARTIN WISCKOL, Politics reporter, 714-285-2867 or mwisckol@ocregister.com twitter.com/MartinWisckol
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Is this Poizner for real? He thinks business is over regulated! and “We will never balance the budget until we cut taxes” Poizner said just before the cow jumped over the moon.
it would have been fun to listen to the debate. but listening to Poizner’s whiny voice for over an hour would have me climbing the walls. unless someone can prove to me that they would actually do what they claim they would do I’m going to vote for Jerry Brown. i heard he believes in God and the afterlife. Being 72 years old he’s going to have to start living by christian standards pretty soon if he intends to enter those purly gates. one of those standards is ‘thou shalt not lie’. all the others are way to young to worry about such trivialities. therefore, Jerry gets my vote. I used to vote based on issues. Not anymore. now I try to guess who’s not going to lie.
So far my vote goes to Poizner.
From my understanding he has walked the walk on his operation of the insurance commissioner’s office regarding budget and efficiency.
We tried a supposedly manly man for governor and instead we got a girly man.
Frankly, I don’t care what the guy’s voice sounds like as long as he can perform something along the lines of his campaign platform.
Since Campbell already acted to raise our taxes, he is gone as far as
I’m concerned. He is just another one of the scum we don’t want
running our state.
Whitman appears to me to just be political machine with the right
verbage but without much substance. Her absense from these debates is telling I think.
Jerry Brown has no doubt mellowed since he last held the governor’s office and I think he is a decent guy. But I have to learn where he stands on the issues. If it is the old spend ’til you are blind and then
tax some more which seems to be standard democratic procedure
then I could never support him.
You say that “Campbell already acted to raise our taxes.” If you study it, Tom Campbell was responsibly attempting to stem the bleeding from a collapsing state government. Tom Campbell is a man of integrity and speaks openly and honestly about the predicament that we’re in and offers reasoned, thoughtful solutions.
I dislike taxes and big government probably more than most (see my post “The Oppressive Progressive Income Tax: California Edition” at http://soquelbythecreek.blogspot.com/2009/07/oppressive-progressive-income-tax.html). As a former state Finance Director, back when California had balanced state budgets and no accounting gimmicks, Mr. Campbell has repeatedly warned that the Legislator’s sheninigans and Enron-like accounting are NOT going to fix the problem, only make matters worse! California Personal Income Tax (PIT) revenues will be down sharply for years to come. In 2006, HALF of the entire PIT tax bill was paid by about 2% of the taxpaying population (which is an even smaller fraction than the total legal and illegal population). Most of that revenue was from capital gains on stocks and real estate. While the stock market has bounced back some, most serious investors have losses from 2008 to counteract the taxes on any gains. Real estate gains wont kick in for awhile. The state must now refund much of the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) revenues that it (wrongly, IMHO) collected for years. PIT withholding is also down significantly do to smaller paychecks and unemployment.
Tom Campbell has a detailed thoughtful plan on how to fix the state. There are specifics that I do not like, but as a whole, it’s a major step forward for the state.
Wow, you sound like a perfect sheep. I for one had enough of Brown the first time around. How soon they forget…
The great thing about Campbell is that he IS the honest candidate. Too often campaigns focus on things that are beyond the reach of the office they are striving for, but Campbell’s demonstrated how he will use the tools of the governor’s office to create a balanced budget.
The simple fact of the matter is that ANY plan to set the capitol to rights is going to require both spending cut and taxes, no matter if it’s Poizner, Whitman, Campbell, Brown, or Newsom in office. Rather than walking into an unknown, ambiguous new administration, why not take the one that is issue focused with a clear plan for giving us a better future?
For God’s sake. They want want to cut everything except prisons. Now think about it, not only free food, free housing, free clothes AND free healthcare and for such a bargain, only about $50,000 dollars a year per inmate. Why, we could just close the schools and ship them all off to prison. Maybe we could get some of that free Obama stimulus money to build the prisons.
Don’t forget about the cheap slave labor that often goes along with prisons. Now they even have prison “call centers”. I hate to sound paranoid, but with private companies taking over more and more prisons, and with the masses of slave labor available…..well it’s kind of a conflict of interest.
We incarcerate more of our population, per capita, than any other western industrialized country. Yet in many cases, our crime rates are higher.
we have more illegals and offspring of illegals committing more crime than any other state. what do you expect we do with them? hand them a bus ticket to Vegas and say “have a nice day?”. it’s only the cost of housing such criminals that I’m really concerned with. and if we actually took care of those on death row, we wouldn’t have nearly as many financial worries with regards to prisons.
If you actually listened to the debate, you would have heard both candidates talk about various possible solutions.
California’s prision costs are the highest in the country yet we’re still under federal government mandates to improve the system. Why? Because it costs far more to incarcerate a prisioner in CA than elsewhere. I like Tom Campbell’s idea of outsourcing prisioner care to other states with unfilled facilities that meet federal standard and at much lower costs.
We HAVE to vote for the person who will cut spending and not taxes at this point. We’re in such a hole, if we don’t start making more of an effort to do the tough stuff first, Californians are going to continue to suffer.
**But that means it might be someone who would let gay people get married, and then we’re ALL doomed.
At this point Meg Whitman.
Unseat all your career politicians and incumbents. They are all responsible for current state of affairs, Democrats and Republicans.
i”m thinking Campbell, i want the border closed and manned. We would save billions
… Brown is ahead of all other candidates …
If the voters of this state and special interests are stupid enough to perpetuate the liberal stranglehold on CA that, for the most part, has created the mess we’re in by voting into office Brown or any of his ilk then … stupid is what stupid does.
Did you see this article from today’s Sacramento Bee?
“Unions don’t wait for Brown to declare candidacy before donating”
http://www.sacbee.com/topstories/story/2290213.html?qwxq=4004413&pageNum=1
The 2010 Election Distortion Process begins!
SEIU spent $60M for a President. How much can a governor cost?
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-obama-sternjun28,0,5918169.story
Download these California Fair Political Practices Commission reports.
“The Billion Dollar Money Train”
http://www.fppc.ca.gov/reports/billion_dollar_money_train.pdf
“Independent Expenditures: The Giant Gorilla in Campaign Finance”
http://www.fppc.ca.gov/ie/IEReport2.pdf
See Chart 2 in “Expenditures” for the biggest spenders. Most are public-employee unions (SIEU, teachers, firefighters, prison guards). Surprise!
It’s a vicious cycle.
* Mandated union dues begets
* Campaign contributions to candidates begets
* Increased government spending/taxes begets
* More government employees and mandated union-only projects begets
* More mandated union dues.
Rinse, lather, repeat!
Want more of the same? Keep voting the past. Me? I’m voting for Tom Campbell (www.campbell.org).
Mickey Mouse.
It won’t do anyone any good to be governor until the bureaucracy is brought under control.
It is outta control.
Anyone promising you tax cuts can’t deliver them. As for spending, it actually already is down over the last few years, except that revenue has fallen even more. Besides, taxes are already scheduled to go down in 2011, when this year’s compromise hikes run out.
People need to think about which plan has the best chance of becoming reality, not just which one panders to your point of view. Poizner might as well promise a visit from Santa Claus, because what he tells you he will do cannot be done without Democratic support…as a result, it will not happen.
Give me a list of where government spending will be SLASHED. I am not voting on anything but how deeply the candidate is willing to slash. The longest list wins my vote.
Tom Campbell has specifics listed on his campaign web site (www.campbell.org).
I listened to the entire debate. Both are worthy candidates but I’m sticking with Tom Campbell. While I greatly respect Mr. Poizner, I feel Mr. Campbell’s background and previous experience will make him a superior California governor (I know that the recent crop of governors has set the bar very, very low).
Tom Campbell has specifically outlined on his campaign web site (www.campbell.org) where spending cuts would come and where the state must invest more (water anyone?). He also outlines how he would restructure the state’s counterproductive taxation system that chases away employers and productive citizens. He also shares the can-do, free-enterprise, minimal government philosophy that made California great in the first place.
Admittedly, I’ve been a long Tom Campbell fan since he was my U.S. Congressman in Silicon Valley. He proved to be a person of great ability, integrity, and intelligence–exactly the characteristics that unfortunately seems to disqualify most from political office.
The third leading Republican candidate, former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, declined an invitation to participate in the debate at Brandman University, a new offspring of Chapman University
—————————————————————————-
Earth to Meg! You didn’t vote for years and now you don’t debate? Come on woman, you need to kick it up a notch.
at this rate, you can pretty much count her out completely pretty soon. I know I did, for the exact reasons you state as well as her past associations with Democrats.
Poizner is economically nuts! I agree with Campbell you must cut spending before cutting taxes. Since so many people go crazy with this another way to put it would be: cut spending before cutting revenue. Like it or not every state collects revenue and its called taxes.
As for Whitman…she doesn’t vote, she doesn’t debate, she doesn’t get my vote.
campbell sounds like a republican that rush/shawn/beck would despise, so obviously he is the best choice. sounds like he is trying to bring rational decision making to government, which is novel in the current-day republican party.
So far, Poizner is the only one who has proven he can run a government agency under budget. He wants to revamp California’s education system in large part by cutting down on the bloated district office employees. While brief, he does have experience as a teacher. We do need someone who has experience owning and running a business. He seems to have the most common sense.
Jerry Brown was laughed out of office during his last term as California Governor (& not re-elected). Plus, he’s being forced to show where he stands. Since the citizens pay committee decided that California State Officials will take an 18% paycut beginning December 2010, those same people have filed an appeal with our State Attorney General, Jerry Brown. So…. whose side will he be on? Will he uphold our perfectly legal and voter initiated committee decision, or will he give the overly generous salaies, per-diems and car allowances back to our elected state officials?
Meg, I fear, is in it to promote her own agenda in joining the big business bandwagon that the federal government is so bent on supporting.
I need to do more research on Campbell. My first thought is not to support yet another career politician.