Hasta La Vista, Baby

Within a few hours, Arnold Schwarzenegger will be jobless — an ironic truth to accompany the galloping crisis suffered by the state he has governed over the past seven years. He will relinquish his scepter of power to a Democrat, Jerry Brown, who returns to the office almost three decades later. Struck by an unemployment rate of 12.4 percent and with a deficit established at $20 billion, he will take his leave through public forum, a means of assessment. Much to his grief, it is a negative balance sheet for California.

No matter how hard he tries, he can’t help but be reminded that in broad terms, that figure is like a summation of his term in office. Clearly you can say, and with good reason, that in 2003 he inherited a state in the middle of a grave electricity, water supply and prison system crisis. In addition, the state’s debt threatened future shortages. At that time, the problem was that he hesitated to stop the hemorrhaging, although he had the confidence and the support of the voters to do it. That ultimately cost him dearly.

Failures

In a recent interview with The Los Angeles Times, the ex-actor admitted that his first and most serious error was supporting an initiative to continue borrowing money ($15 billion, to be exact). This was an attempt not to burden the voters with more taxes.

“It was a mistake,” he said. “I should’ve gone the other direction to early on solve the budget problem and use the political muscle I had in that first year in office.”

He believes, however, that his plan would have worked had it not been for the recession that hit the world’s eighth-largest economy. Shaken by the astronomical number of evictions and loss of capital in the movie industry, which quickly sank the California finances, many movie shootings left Hollywood for states with more favorable financial policies.

Insights

In favor of “the Governator,” his aggressive law will always be relied upon in order to fight against climate change, which proposes to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases by 15 percent by 2020. Despite his characteristic style with cases of gay weddings and recreational marijuana consumption, there were clear intentions of alleviating such a worn budgetary deficit, although he got behind on some things.

He will always have Hollywood, where he has threatened to return if they offered him an interesting role. But first, he will have to participate in his successor’s opening ceremony. One can argue that the $20 billion of the budget in the red will be a burden to Brown. The famous Schwarzenegger will leave him the lamentable state of public education after budget cuts and the overpopulation in state prisons, just to mention a few.

As it has been said, he will always have Hollywood.