Governor upbeat about Economy

Our famously optimistic Governor thinks we are being too negative about the economy, and that everything will be fine. As reported in the San Francisco Chronicle:

At a time when Sacramento is struggling to balance its checkbook, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger gave a robust assessment of the state’s economic strength Thursday and claimed the media is overstating the depth of the national slowdown.

“I don’t like the coverage that I see, because it’s a little bit too negative,” the celebrity-governor said in a speech to a civic group, Town Hall Los Angeles. “The reality of it is, it’s not that bad,” Schwarzenegger said. State finances “did go down with the economy, but we are going to be OK in California.”

Schwarzenegger’s remarks echoed in part an assessment of the national economy by President Bush, who expressed concern Thursday about slowing growth but predicted the nation is not bound for recession. “I believe that our economy has got the fundamentals in place for us to … grow and continue growing, more robustly hopefully than we’re growing now,” Bush said in Washington.

Faced with a troubled housing market and the largest projected budget gap in the nation, Schwarzenegger has called for across-the-board cuts to most state programs and said Thursday his administration “should go after” so-called tax loopholes. There are “tax loopholes out there that we can close that will give us additional money for our budget, so we don’t have to make just cuts,” the governor told reporters after his speech, without committing to specific steps.

The governor argued that the state is better positioned than many others to rebound, because of the diversity of California’s economy, which includes the entertainment capital in Los Angeles and high-tech powerhouses in the Silicon Valley. State income is higher than at this time last year, he said, but falling below projections for growth. But the state’s financial condition is nothing like 2003, he argued, when he was elected in a historic recall election. “We have turned things around,” he argued.