Today’s Sacramento Bee has a good article on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s inconsistent tax rhetoric, and Kevin Yamamura does a good job showing how Arnold relies on semantics to justify supporting fees while threatening to veto several proposals to close tax loopholes, including for online sales and for corporate tax calculations.

But what the article really reveals is that Arnold Schwarzenegger has a very simple approach to taxes that the rhetoric merely obscures: any tax on corporations is bad, but taxes on everyone else are just fine. Arnold Schwarznegger is bent on making the working people of California pay to keep vital services operating in order to fund tax breaks for his corporate allies. From Yamamura’s article:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger threatened last week to veto a bill that would reduce a corporate tax break, calling it a tax increase. He says requiring Amazon.com to collect tax dollars already owed is a new tax burden.

But he believes a new surcharge on property insurance is a “fee” that Californians ought to pay.

The Republican governor has pledged not to raise taxes in his final year in office, but whether that holds true depends on what your definition of a tax is. Legislative counsel already has drafted the insurance fee as a tax bill.

We can draw the distinction even more clearly. Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to give Amazon.com a big tax break, but is going to drive up the health care costs of hundreds of thousands of families by further gutting state health care programs. He wants to give oil companies a massive tax break by refusing to support an oil severance tax to fund higher education, but supports a 30% increase in the fees students have to pay for higher education. He supported a sales tax increase but opposes closing a reckless corporate tax loophole opened in the February 2009 budget deal that costs the state $2 billion a year.

Most Californians now understand that Arnold Schwarzenegger has been a catastrophic failure for the state, having left California in much worse shape than he found it in 2003.

Only now are Californians beginning to understand why that is the case. Arnold Schwarzenegger came to power with the primary mission of helping his corporate allies enrich themselves at our expense. Meg Whitman is poised to finish the job by destroying what remains of California’s shared prosperity by cutting and privatizing most public services, massively increasing the cost to most Californians but being able to claim she’s avoided new taxes in the process.

It’s further evidence of how anti-tax politics don’t actually work – they wind up costing most taxpayers more money in the end, by making them more individually responsible for paying for necessary services that were cheaper when the cost was pooled.