California’s deficit crisis isn’t the product of special interests and big government utopianism, according to California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, R. Rather it is the consequence of California being forced to pay for an immigration system it cannot maintain.
On CNN’s State of the Union this morning, Schwarzenegger said:
We don’t need a bailout from them, but we need for them to pay, because it’s inexcusable, for instance, in California … we pay approximately a billion dollars for the incarceration of undocumented immigrants and we get $100 million from the federal government. … The same is with health care. And this is why I made it very clear that I will now caution about this whole health care reform. I endorsed it and I was all for it. But now all of a sudden, we find out that it’s going to cost California $3 billion … I think we cannot do it.
To suggest that the reason for California’s budget crisis is even remotely the consequence of bad immigration policy may have a certain ring to it, but it falls flat on its face. “Approximately a billion dollars” may sound like a lot. But welfare and MediCal cost the state $57 billion. And given the state’s steeply progressive tax rate, recessions hit the state particularly hard.
Of course, Schwarzenegger is partly to blame for the eventual realization that the cost of health care reform to California is $3 billion — he backed the effort despite CBO report after CBO report showing the high costs.
