By Patrick Walsh, Senior Staff Columnist
The old line has become mindnumbing by now and I’m only 21 years old. Every election cycle it begins: the endless battle cry that this election is the most important election of our lifetime. We hear it from presidential candidates all the way to city council hopefuls. It is now a cliché. However, for our state leadership, this may very well be the most important election we have ever faced.
Just look at the current shape our state is in: California is broke. Last year we had to issue IOU’s to pay off our debts. Our taxes are some of the highest in the nation. Our business climate is so bad companies don’t want to be based out of this once-premier state. Millions of jobs and potential taxpayers have fled in large to Conservative states such as Arizona and Texas because of this cutthroat approach we take toward businesses. Our state has one of the highest unemployment rates in the nation. We have more people emigrating our state than immigrating for the first time in our history. The left wing of the Democratic Party has driven our state off a cliff. We need a fix, and not from a movie star hero, but from a real-life hero.
Meg Whitman took eBay from a small company to a multi-billion dollar enterprise right here in California. In an election where job growth is the number one issue, Whitman is the only candidate who has actually created jobs. Jerry Brown has already been a failed governor, twice. He has been in Sacramento politics so long The Rolling Stones looked somewhat human when he first began. Brown epitomizes what we need to get rid of in California. The labor unions, which sap up 80 percent of our state’s tax revenue, have bankrolled his campaign. I can promise you, once Brown is elected governor, those labor unions and special interest groups will be lined up all the way from Aztec Center to the governor’s office waiting for their paybacks.
It is this kind of “pay people off for their votes” attitude that has turned California into a welfare state. If California were a country, our demise would be similar to the complete collapse of Greece.
It is because of the state of Californian affairs and the response of Whitman that has me firm in my belief for a Conservative fiscal approach for solving California’s problems. Republicans have been run out of the state far too long, and look what Democrats have done to it. They have failed, and California is on the brink of collapse. Our school systems were once the top in the nation. Now we are among the worst. Yet most Californians don’t get it, or they are too partisan to see through what the head honchos of the Democratic Party dictate to them.
Whitman knows what to do and she is focused. She is honing her sights on three things: jobs, spending and education. She knows the only way to fix our job market is to make it easier for businesses to start in California. She knows we don’t have a revenue problem. Our state already gorges itself on the income of the top tier of the wealthy who pay for 50 percent of our state’s taxes. We have a spending problem of epic proportions. Our legislators continue to spend money we don’t have on meaningless pet projects and entitlements. She knows the only way to fix our education system is to break up the centralized bureaucratic control of our state school system which holds no one accountable for progress and is run by the self-serving teachers union. We need to give that power to the local level where parents will have a say in how their children’s schools are run.
The choice is ours in this election in California, and it comes at a perilous time. Can we get California back to greatness? Yes we can, and only through the proven leadership of Whitman.
—Patrick Walsh is a political science senior.
—The views expressed in this column do not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Daily Aztec.
