dollarack.thumbnail.jpgRepublicans and their friends in the GOP/Media Complex depend on Americans to have zero historical memory or cognitive skills. (That’s likely a key reason why they want to destroy public schools.) If we have no memory and no way to put it to good use, we can’t see the irony of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Tim Pawlenty, two governors who claim to be fiscally responsible, being in fact unbelievably bad with our money.

Let’s start with Arnold, shall we? He’s currently facing a $40 billion budget shortfall in California, the state he allegedly governs. The whole reason he’s governor is because the Republicans had Gray Davis recalled over a $38 billion budget shortfall — and guess what? As both Davis and Paul Krugman pointed out at the time (h/t to The Daily Howler), that budget shortfall had already been whittled down to $8 billion for the coming fiscal year, and would likely have been eliminated the year after that, had his policies been left untouched by Schwarzenegger.

But of course, the problem is that they weren’t. Among the first things Arnold did was to repeal the state tax on cars. As Schwarzenegger himself stated earlier this year, that "gave $20 billion back" to Californians — or rather, took away $20 billion in revenues over the years (at least $4 billion to start, plus another $4 billion for each year afterward), or half the amount of the current deficit, from the state. (He would later impose a regressive car tax, in the form of new drivers’ fees, when it became apparent that the state couldn’t be run on hot air and deficit spending.)

In Pawlenty’s case, the majority of the deficit-causing tax cuts first were engineered when he was the Majority Leader of the Minnesota House starting in 1998. From 1997 to 2001, the Republican-dominated state legislature, with the blessing of then-Governor Jesse Ventura, pushed through billions of dollars in permanent tax cuts; if those cuts hadn’t happened, the state wouldn’t have faced a $4.2 billion deficit, but a $1.3 billion surplus, as the total cumulative revenue drain of the tax-cutting orgy by the time Pawlenty won the governorship was $5.5 billion. There would have been no need for draconian, Grover-Norquist-approved budget and service cuts, or for cities and counties to try and shoulder the burden Pawlenty and his fellow Republican and Independence Party tax-haters blew off at the state level. There would have been no need to use regressive taxation in the form of user fees to make up for the tax cuts, either.

Why do both Schwarzenegger and Pawlenty hate fiscal responsibility? Because they both have, off and on, entertained dreams of becoming president — at one point Republicans considered changing the Constitution so the Austrian-born Schwarzenegger could be eligible for the presidency — and the only way to woo the Republican base voters in the primaries is to cut taxes, especially on rich persons. Even if it means destroying America in the process.