Former e-Bay CEO Meg Whitman, whose campaign for governor has avoided contact with the mainstream California press for months, sat down last Thursday for a tea-and-crumpets chat with Flash Report publisher Jon Fleischman, the text of which Fleischman published today.
Whitman talks very generally about how she sees the state's budget crisis, and says one of her starting points would be to roll back state spending to 2000-2001 levels because revenues have now been pared back to those levels.
She suggests it would be easily doable because the state population has grown by "only 3 percent."
Here's guessing that she never so wildly underestimated the growth in the number of people selling things on e-Bay. In fact, according to the Department of Finance's population unit, the number of people in California has soared by 11.2 percent since 2001. There were 34.4 million people in 2001, and 38.3 million in 2009.
(NOTE: Whitman campaign spokesman Mitch Zak told me today that Whitman bases her position on the belief that adapting spending to 2001 levels can be achieved because the population has grown by "slightly more than 3 million people," and that the candidate mispoke when she said "3 percent." The actual growth was, in fact, much closer to 4 million people -- 3.86 million.))
Two thoughts;
1) If as the headline suggests Whitman is Math Challenged, she should fit right in in Sacramento where they haven't been able to get the bugget numbers right in numerous attempts.
2)Whitman has alot of voters on her side when she speaks of rolling state spending back to 2001 levels. Since this column is usually the cheerleading section for the CA demoncratic party I'm not suprised that you've fired up the naysaying machine.
I personnally think we should roll state and federal spending back to 1933 levels before FDR cursed us with the RAW Deal.