Schwarzenegger’s New Creative Center: Spend & Borrow

Arnold Schwarzenegger attends his inaugural on crunches and reaffirms that he is a “big government conservative”:

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who once taunted Democrats as “girlie men,” called Friday for an end to partisan bickering and a focus on innovative centrist policies. In a elaborately staged inaugural that included singers breaking into choruses of “Hallelujah” right after he took the oath of office, Schwarzenegger said California could serve as a model to the rest of the country and larger world. “At one time, the greatest public policy innovations came from liberals, such as during the New Deal,” the Republican celebrity said. “Then the most innovative ideas came from conservatives, such as Ronald Reagan.

The New Deal is code for spend & spend and Reagan is code for borrow & borrow. Schwarzenegger wants to pretend the government can increase spending without increasing taxes. But he is following the model of the past six years in Washington, D.C. known as Bush’s fiscal policy.

Update: Greg Mankiw finds more spend and borrow in
Massachusetts:

With Deval Patrick now in the corner office on Beacon Hill, officials and community leaders south of Boston are applauding his decision to restore budget cuts made by former governor Mitt Romney. The restored cuts statewide amount to $383.6 million … The money was cut in November, when Romney, invoking his so-called 9C authority, used emergency fiscal powers to slash $450 million from the state budget, blaming the Legislature for a spending crisis. He later restored some of the cuts. Patrick said last month that the $383.6 million in cuts hurt thousands of poor people across the state and that he would restore them. Since then, aides to Patrick said the state faces a deficit that could reach $1 billion this year. Some expressed skepticism about Patrick’s pledge and ability to restore the cuts. “He declared there’s a $1 billion gap and reversed $400 million in cuts,” said David G. Tuerck, executive director of the Beacon Hill Institute, a conservative economic think tank. “It puzzles me how he can do both.” But Michael J. Widmer, executive director of the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation, said he did not see a problem. Widmer, who worked as a volunteer co-chairman on a transition committee that studied budget issues for Patrick, said Romney was wrong to make the cuts in the first place because there was no fiscal crisis.

While Widmer is saying there is no fiscal crisis – suppose he’s not correct. Will Governor Patrick propose a tax increase or will he borrow and pander like our California governor?