Bill Simon: En Route to Sacramento : Gunning for the governorship.(Brief Article)

Bill Simon looks a little like Christopher Reeve when he was doing Superman, wearing those horn-rimmed glasses which were supposed to make him appear pedestrian. Of course if you want to pass by unnoticed, which Superman wanted to do when he wasn't on a tear, you don't run for governor of California, a state that specializes in high dramatic dress, and California is not going to find that in William E. Simon Jr., a candidate without a lot of plumage.

On the other hand, it hasn't found anything striking in Gray Davis, other than his high spending. But Californians at large don't seem to have noticed that, or anything else inordinate in government. Simon is of course trying to do something about that.

On a recent Saturday, at an evening with friends and backers in the Sacramento area, the candidate was reminded that in the last ten years, California has graduated from 39th to 44th on the list of states engaged in what amounts to philanthropy to other states. Only six states contribute a higher percentage of taxes to the federal government, measured against returns. For every dollar Californians remit to Washington, Californians get back 82 cents. That would be okay if California were all Bill Gates, but of course he lives elsewhere and California is in very bad economic shape. Gov. Davis has increased spending by 39 percent more than would simply keep pace with inflation and population. A lot of Californians are unaware of this -- and apparently unaware that the next governor is going to have to find a way to raise $27 billion, or to reduce spending by that much.

Here are some nice figures to store in your statistics bank. The State of California spends per year just about $100 billion. Its GDP is $1.3 trillion. Pre-Gray, California's income was the fifth largest of any political unit in the world (after the U.S., Japan, Germany, and Britain). France has edged up, and California down. This may have something to do with the quality of public education in California, which is the 46th worst in the nation. California has the most Nobel Prize winners and the most illiteracy, but Gray Davis doesn't talk about that; he is comfortable with the routine lament over the ratio of poor to non-poor.

I have a special friend who has a special son, whose balmy disposition makes Perry Como sound like a tiger. Tim Draper did everything a 40- year-old could do to liberate the public-education system in California from the teachers unions, which underwrite the poor school standards. The bad news is that the plebiscite, which would have returned power to parents, lost in 2000 by two to one, in part because the unions control even the parent-teacher associations. Tim Draper certainly did what he could -- he paid out $27 million to back the proposition. It must be true hell to lose that much money on a lost political cause, but Tim Draper put it this way to his father: "If I had cashed all those securities in today, Dad, I'd have netted only two million dollars." That's Pangloss you just heard, and Bill Simon appears capable of that kind of ...