Meg Whitman’s voodoo economics have been a target of ours here at Calitics all year long. Now others are beginning to take notice. Over at Think Progress, the Wonk Room shows how Whitman’s vague proposals cannot possibly hope to close the $19 billion budget gap:

I pointed out yesterday that California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman’s (R) job creation plan is based on a tax cut that economists don’t believe will create jobs or boost investment. Rather, it would amount to nothing more than a giveaway to California’s wealthy.

But Whitman’s plan to balance the state budget also leaves a lot to be desired. As UC Berkley economic Michael Reich noted, Whitman’s promise to cut $15 billion from the budget “necessarily implies significant reductions in spending on education, health, and social service programs on top of the deep cuts already made in the past two years.” But you won’t hear that from her, if her interview today with the New York Times’ John Harwood is any indication.

In that NY Times interview Whitman doubles down on her voodoo economics:

HARWOOD: Every single, at the national level, big deficit reduction package…has involved tax increases, revenue, as well as spending cuts. Is the better part of honesty and candor with the voters of California to say that’s what you’re going to have to do as well?

WHITMAN: I don’t believe we are going to have to do that. I am against increasing taxes on Californians.

HARWOOD: You can close a $19 billion budget deficit just by cutting spending?

WHITMAN: And growing the economy.

We’ve seen this movie before, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger who claimed he could close the deficit without tax increases. He was wrong, and acknowledged his failure in February 2009 by agreeing to temporary tax increases. The taxes have not included sufficient revenues from the wealthy and large corporations, so the structural revenue shortfall remains in place.

Whitman pledges to eliminate the state’s capital gains tax, increasing the budget deficit by $5 billion without doing much to create jobs in California. So now we’re looking at a Whitman budget deficit of around $25 billion. The four areas where Whitman said she’d cut in the NYT interview – laying off public workers, slashing public pensions, cutting welfare benefits even further, and “run the government more efficiently” – are vaguely defined but as the Wonk Room explained, these don’t come close to closing the entire gap.

So where does the rest come from? Education and health care. Whitman is likely to begin privatizing our K-12 schools, cutting funding further and forcing schools to seek outside funding to survive. She probably won’t privatize in one fell swoop, but would starve the public system of money to the point where private funding is needed to survive, making it easier to achieve total privatization. One wonders what she thinks of David Harmer’s call to “abolish the public schools.”

As to health care, Whitman opposed the federal health care reform and would likely refuse to implement it while slashing even deeper into Medi-Cal and other state health services.

And she’ll do all of it in order to make the rich richer.

Meg Whitman has no jobs plan, she has no budget plan – she just has a plan to give more money to her wealthy allies and watch the rest of us suffer. No wonder she’s flailing in the polls – that’s not the kind of California voters want.