No surprise: Jerry Brown is running for office again.  In Jerry’s words, “I’ve run for more offices than any other candidate that still is alive.”  This time, he is the lone Democrat candidate running for Governor in California.  Since his belated announcement last week, Jerry has done his best to sound reasonable as a candidate.  Surely, California voters should know it is only an act.

In running for those many offices, Brown has taken countless liberal positions.  As Governor, Brown empowered public employee unions, strongly opposed the death penalty and appointed judges who strongly opposed it.  He opposed Prop 13 before he was for it – but only after the voters passed it. When he ran for President, in 1980, he was for universal health care and said his economic agenda was based, in part, on Buddhist Economics – followers of which endeavor to measure “Gross National Happiness.”  In 1992, when he ran for the Presidency a third time, he touted “living wages,” fought free trade agreements and said he would consider Jesse Jackson as a running mate notwithstanding Jackson’s controversial if not anti-Semitic remarks.  Such is the life of a career liberal like Jerry Brown.

In 2009, while still in the race for Governor, liberal Gavin Newsom said of Jerry Brown’s candidacy: “We’re not content to relive history. We’re going to keep making it.”  To ensure that Brown’s latest history would not include a loss to Newsom, Brown resumed his liberal ways.

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California has the worst bond rating in the nation, hovering just above junk bond status.  A lower bond rating means higher interest rates when selling bonds – and California already spends $10 billion per year in bond principal and interest repayments.

In this, as in many other things, California leads the nation, for better or for worse (repaying the money borrowed for President Obama’s Stimulus will cost every American $280 a month for life).

Some people place a portion of California’s debt problem at the feet of voters who approve nearly every bond initiative, from $3 billion for an embryonic stem cell research bond to $10 billion in debt to build a high-speed rail system.

It’s hard to blame citizens of the Golden State for voting for debt when the most famous Californian, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, proclaims bonds “a gift from the future.”  It’s also hard to blame voters for approving bonds when the bond ballot descriptions and arguments are chock full of shaky claims.

Take November 2008’s much promoted High-Speed Rail Initiative, Proposition 1A.  Voters approved it by 52-48 after proponents, such as train manufacturers and unions poured $2.5 million into the effort.  As with almost every bond measure, there was no funded opposition.  The measure’s proponents, big business and labor unions, claimed that the trains would offer time-saving travel “AT A CHEAPER COST!” than air travel or car.  And that, the train would, “give Californians a real alternative to skyrocketing gasoline prices and dependence on foreign oil while reducing greenhouse gases. Building high-speed rail is cheaper than expanding highways and airports to meet California’s population growth.”

Really?  Who checks these claims?
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