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Wednesday, 06/02/2010 Print Version |
Good afternoon. My name is Aaron McLear, I'm Governor Schwarzenegger's Press Secretary. We're here with the Governor for our Tweetcast. We've asked the Governor's 1.7 million followers to submit questions. We've had a ton of questions on a lot of different things, and so we're going to go through a few of those right now. And then also we're going to take some live, so if you've not submitted a question yet, submit a question to #q4gov -- again, #q4gov -- and we're going to take some of your questions live.So with that, Governor Schwarzenegger, I'll go ahead with the first question here. FriarShock asks: How successful were you in your May health goals?Well, first of all, let me just say that I enjoy always talking directly to the people. You know, we Twitter all the time and bring them up to date, our Twitter followers, of what I do every day. And if there are exciting moments we want to share them. Like today, we were with Olympic athletes that competed in the Winter Olympics, and I thought it was great to be with them and we wanted to share that and other events like that. It's always good to talk directly rather than filtered through the press, so this is what this is all about.Now, when we talk about my fitness month of May, I set a goal of losing 10 pounds and to stay away from bread and from desserts and also not to smoke a stogie. But knowing myself, that sometimes there is also failure, so I said to myself, "OK, for each time I cheat I will pay $1,000." And the $1,000 goes to Maria's favorite charity, which is the California Museum.So I have to admit that I cheated 10 times, so I owe $10,000. That's number one. I cheated twice with bread and dessert and then eight times with stogies. I did smoke some stogies, so I owe them $10,000. But I did lose the 10 pounds that I wanted to lose.Well, I'm sure Maria will appreciate that. The next question comes from Matt Kinkaid, and Matt asks: "Guv, how best can we in California stimulate business development and growth in a slow economy?"Well, I think the most important thing is, first of all, to have the Legislature pass the rest of our Job Creation Packages. They passed two, which is the green manufacturing equipment, to exempt that from the sales tax, and also the homebuyer's tax credit, which was very effective. It stimulated the building of new homes, which of course has a domino effect, because it creates jobs for the plumbers, for the carpenters, the roofers, the electricians, the cement workers, the landscape artists, for everybody. And so that's how you put people to work.And of course there are others, which is I asked them to streamline the permitting process, which is very important for construction. And also to go and do tort reform, which is another very important one, which is holding businesses back because they have to pay such extraordinary amounts of money when they make just one mistake. So those are the kind of things that we want to do.And the other important thing is for us not to go and increase taxes, because there are a lot of people, whenever there is a budget crunch here, people, as you know, talk about "Well, maybe we have to raise taxes." That would be the worst thing you can do to the economy right now. The economy is very sensitive right now. It's on the way back. We see this with home sales, we see it with car sales, we see it in the stock market -- it has come up from 6,500 to 10,000, sometimes 11,000, then it goes down to 10 -- but it is on the way up, so we see great movement there. And also, a lot of the foreclosures have now kind of settled down and stopped. So I think that raising taxes would be a big mistake.OK. We just got one about our current economic situation about a minute and a half ago. CarKingdom asks you: "Whatever happened to the IOUs and the state of economic crisis that California was facing?" Maybe you can kind of give an update on where we're at with that.Well, I think, first of all, we have paid off all the IOUs and we solved our last year's budget crisis, which was $60 billion. But that didn't mean that we eliminated all the budget problems of the future. This year we have another $20 billion budget deficit and there have to be more cuts that have to be made in order to live within our means.The important thing for us now is to stimulate the economy as quickly as possible and to do, like I said earlier, to do everything that we can to make people get back to work. The most important thing is for everyone to have a job; anyone that is willing to work should have a job. That should be our goal. It's pretty much like in 2003 when I came into office. We had an economic crisis and we created hundreds of thousands, almost a million new jobs, but then we got hit again by and economic crisis and then we lost those jobs. Now we have to go and rebuild those jobs again and bring them back, and then our economy comes back. That creates more revenues for the state and then we can afford again the programs that are so much needed.The key thing also is, besides just talking about the budget last year and this year, we need budget reform. And I've been talking about that for an endless amount of years, ever since I've come into office, that you can't have a budget where you have no rainy day fund set aside, because our economy and our revenues always fluctuate. You know, one year you see the economy going really well, it goes up. And then the next year it goes down.But you can't go and have all of those programs on that roller-coaster ride. You know, like this last year, we had a drop in revenues of 27 percent, the year before more than 20 percent. This year again we have a huge drop in revenues. So you can't just all of a sudden take all this money away from the school system and then the kids suffer because of that. Or higher education, or from prisons. You can't take this money from prisons, because then you would have to let out prisoners. Or law enforcement.So it is much healthier for a state if you have a rainy day fund set aside so, when you have those drops in revenues, at least you can get money from the rainy day fund and put it into those very important programs, if it is child care or if it is In-Home Supportive Services, if it is K-12 education and so on, or higher education.Right. And that's actually a very popular question. Less than a minute ago Americon here asks: "How would you reform the budget system that is costing the state billions?" I think you just answered his question.Now this one from the BizReview, a little bit lighter: "How steep was the learning curve of bricklaying for you?" Remember, you were a bricklayer. "Did you need college?"Did I need college for bricklaying? No, actually it's, I would say, the other way around. I needed the bricklaying jobs in order to pay for my college, because I was an out-of-state student even though I was living in California, but because I was a foreigner and I didn't have my green card yet. I was on a temporary working permit. So you can only apply for a working permit or a student visa, you couldn't do both. So therefore I had to go and pay out-of-state tuition, which was perfectly fine with me because I just wanted to get the education from California. It was very important to learn English and about the economics and about how businesses operate in California and study accounting, math and all of those things.So I went and literally got bricklaying jobs, or being a personal trainer, or did odd jobs, because in bodybuilding I sure wasn't making enough money. I made just barely enough money to pay for the protein drinks and for the training and to have a change of clothes once a year or something like that. I literally had very little.And bodybuilding in those days was not like today. Bodybuilding was kind of like, you know, just in its beginning stage, in a way, when it comes to popularity. Only after "Pumping Iron" was made it started gaining popularity enough that artists like Andy Warhol or Jamie Wyeth and Leah Ranimen (Phonetic) and people like that painted me, and that created a media madness over that. Or when we were posing in a museum -- you know, those are the kind of things that popularized the sport. But when I was competing in the beginning, when I came over to this country, we made a $1,000 when we won the Mr. Olympia competition. So that's nothing, so I had to do those kind of jobs in order to survive here. And education was very, very important to me, and so this is why I did bricklaying jobs, to pay for the education.And quickly, while you're talking about bodybuilding, it reminded me of a question from YoAdrianWeDidIt -- I think it's a "Rocky" reference: "Arnold, do you still have your Arnold is Numero Uno t-shirt? And what do you remember most about that era?"Oh, I think he's referring to the shirt, the t-shirt that I probably wore in "Pumping Iron."I still have the t-shirt. It's washed. It's not anymore as sweaty as it was then. And I save it, you know, because it was definitely from an era that was very important in my career, because through bodybuilding and through the movie "Pumping Iron," I made the next move to go then and do other movies. That movie popularized the sport and also me, and so it was a wonderful time.And I remember spending four or five hours every day in the gym working out like crazy. And people, bodybuilders from all over the world, came to that gym, which was at first Gold's Gym, then World Gym, and we had a wonderful time working out and great laughs. But we lifted around, I would say, 50 tons of weights a day and we burned around 5,000 calories, so there was a huge amount of training that went in there. But like I said, I have fond memories of it.But then eventually you grow out of that stage of where you want to be the most muscular man in the world and stand up there with the little posing trunks, and get the shots and all this, and get to another stage. And the next stage was for me, I wanted to become an entertainer and be in front of the camera and get into acting, because that's what one of my heroes, Reg Park, did. When he won Mr. Universe he then later on, after winning three Mr. Universe titles, he became an actor and did Hercules movies. So I always wanted to do that, so eventually then I got into acting.And I would say -- and I always say this -- that being here in California and being here in America really made all of this possible, because, you know, Muscle Beach was the Mecca, right here in Southern California was the Mecca of bodybuilding. Hollywood was the Mecca of the entertainment business, so I was in the right place also. So this state and this country gave me all these opportunities.Another question we've been getting a lot of some form of is asking about your May Revision. A question from JRapel16: "Isn't it better to increase taxes instead of cutting down the budget for the California health care program?"Well, first of all, I think that whenever you increase taxes you burden the people. You take money away from the people and then people spend less money, and that stifles the economy and actually your economic activities go down and then the next year we have less revenues coming in. So that's always the danger.Last year we did that, even though I'm very much against raising taxes and I always said that. But last year we had a budget deficit of $60 billion, so we could not really balance the books at all. You couldn't make $60 billion of cuts, so that's why we raised the taxes, but only for two years, $12.5 billion.So this year we're not going to go back there. And even though there are some people that think this is a good idea, we're not going to go and raise taxes. What we want to do is, we want to do the opposite. We want to go and rebuild the economy and make sure that the economy takes off, that people get jobs, like I said earlier. That's the important thing.The other important thing is always we have to be very careful, because by raising taxes and putting them into programs, we run into the danger that government, that the state, that the public sector, becomes bigger than the private sector. And you know, I always talk about this analogy that then Finance Minister Netanyahu gave me when I visited Israel -- now he's the Prime Minister of Israel, but then he was Finance Minister. And I said to him, I said, "We have a budget crisis." That was in 2004. "We have a budget crisis in California. What was your secret to bring the economy back and to get rid of your budget problem?"And he said to me, he said, "When I was in the army," he said, "our superior told us that we should line up and that we should take the guy next to us and put him on our shoulder, and he said then run to the finish line." He said, "The guy that made it first through the finish line was the guy that had the smallest guy on his back. I happened to have a huge guy, he weighed 258." And he said he weighed 200, Netanyahu, at that time. He said, "I was the last one to go through that finish line."So I said, "Well, what was does this have to do with the budget?"And he said, "Well," he said, "the top guy represents the public sector and the bottom guy who does the running and carries it is the private sector. So if the public sector is too heavy and it squashed the private sector," he said, "you can never survive." He said, "This is why it's very important to trim it, not to raise taxes but to strengthen the private sector, because then you can afford all the programs that you need."So I think this is not only in Israel the case, I think that's the case internationally, all over the world. And we see the problems that have arisen in Europe, if it is in Greece or in Spain or in Ireland and other countries like that. They've all gotten into trouble because they spent too much money.Now, of course, we have now a budget crunch and we have an economic crisis. One cannot say that there are too many programs. It's just that you have to be very careful when you go through this stage that you don't keep borrowing from the future or raise taxes, because you get into these more and more serious problems. And that's what we have seen in Europe now. And we don’t want to do that. We already are in deep enough trouble. We're trying to get out of this problem.What we need is not to raise taxes. What we need is to get budget reform so we have a rainy day fund, we limit our spending and don’t spend all the money when we have spikes in revenues. Let's take some of that money and put it aside. We should pay off our debt, which is very important, and we should rebuild and keep building our infrastructure, because that's our future. You know, that's something where you have to think like 10 years ahead, 20 years ahead.We've had a lot of questions, Governor, from your 1.7 million Twitter followers about your potential movie career after this. And about two minutes ago PattyBadFingers asks you: "Can you tell anymore about -- "Patty, P-a-t-t-y, BadFingers. That's her handle, PattyBadFingers. And PattyBadFingers asks: "Can you tell any more about Sylvester Stallone's upcoming movie, 'The Expendables,' and maybe talk about whether or not you're going to do movies after this?"Well, Expendables is a terrific movie. I happened to see it just a few days ago. I've been asking him ever since I did the scene, I said, "Let me see the scene."He said, "No, it's not cut yet," or, "It needs to be tweaked," or, "It needs to be, the music needs to be put in there," and all of those things. But I think what it really was, was he just wanted to finish the movie and perfect it so he can show me the best possible film.And it really blew me away, it was really extraordinary the job that he has done. But I only have a little scene in it. I’m not throughout the movie, I’m only in there -- somewhere one-third into the movie I appear with Bruce Willis.And you know, Sly and I, we have been friends for many years. We have started the whole Planet Hollywood together and Bruce Willis was part of that. We traveled all over the world, we always had a great time. And so he was very smart to kind of get us all together in one scene, because people always wanted us to do a movie. We always were asked. He was always asked by the entertainment journalists, "Will you ever do a movie with Schwarzenegger?" Bruce Willis was asked. I was asked if I would do a movie with Bruce Willis or with Stallone and all this. So here was a situation, even though it was not throughout the movie, but it was a situation where it lent itself for a little scene, a funny scene, a very funny scene. And it's coming out in August.And did that whet my appetite for getting back into the movie business? You know, I'm trying not to think about what I'm going to do after this is over, because there are so many things that we need to do still this year, from budget reform to tax reform, pension reform for public pensions. There is still -- we need to pass the initiative. Next week, as you know, is our Open Primary Initiative, so we want to make sure that that passes so we can then bring politicians easier together and work together, Democrats and Republicans, to solve the important problems that California has.It's important also that down the line in November that we pass the water bonds, which is part of the infrastructure that I talked about. That is so important, to make sure not only to build a new water infrastructure in California -- since we have now 38 million people and by the time it will be built there will be 50 million people -- but also to clean our groundwater. It saddens me, when you hear about all the cancer cases and the health problems amongst people because of the water problems that we have and the pollution in the water and the chemicals in the water and so on. So we put aside for that also. So those are the important things.And this will -- the things that I just said, maybe sound difficult, but when it comes to the negotiations and the two parties, and the two-thirds vote. And Democrats and Republicans are running for office in November because this is election year. So it would be very, very complicated, more so than it sounds. It will be very difficult to get everyone together and to, first of all, have a budget on time and to do all of those things.So the last thing I want to do is think about what I'm going to do next year. I get asked -- this is the most common question I get asked, what are you going to do next year? Are you going to go and do something in the movies, are you going to write books, are you going to give speeches, are you going to work for Obama, are you going to do this or that, are you going to run for office again, and all this.I don't want to think about it. I discipline myself to do the same thing as I have done in sports; keep my eye focused on the ball. You know, keep the eye on the ball, focus on what you're doing. And that's the secret in sports and it's also the secret in life.We just had one pop up 26 seconds ago from MagnetBootGuy right here: "Talking with," I believe Pennsylvania, "to move my startup boot business. What can California do to keep jobs?" That's been a big initiative of yours. You had the GOED Center we just opened up. Can you answer MagnetBootGuy's question there about keeping jobs here in California?Well, like I said earlier, the most important thing is to tell and promise businesses we're not going to raise taxes. As a matter of fact, we want to do the opposite, like we have done with the green technology manufacturing equipment, where we exempt that from taxes, from the sales tax. We want to -- for instance, we want the Legislature to pass legislation, which it has a good chance to do -- that they will give a new-hire tax credit. So when a manufacturer comes, let's say from Pennsylvania out here to California, they, because of hiring new people or retraining new people, they will get a special tax credit to inspire them to come out and then hire more people. Because that's how you create those jobs now. Then, when the economy is booming, jobs will be created automatically. But right now we need those kind of things.We also want to have tort reform. We want to make it easier on businesses to do business here in California. That is the bottom line. It is a great place. California is, without any doubt, the greatest place in the world, and that's why people from around the world want to come here and have businesses here, from China, from Japan or from European countries, or from South America up here, from Canada down. People want to do business here.So we have to do everything that we can, since we already have such perfect weather and have the most extraordinary landscape and the hardest working people and geniuses living in California, really the most innovative people living in California. I think that we have to just make it easy to do business. Any time you ask someone in business, what is your biggest obstacle? They most likely will say government. And so this is why it is important that we stay out of the way. Let business do business and not overregulate. Let them do business, and then everyone will be successful.There's a question here about waste, fraud and abuse from the user JessicaRothar: "Shouldn’t California's --" she say's $14 billion, it's actually $2 billion"-- in corporate tax breaks be audited to make sure they're actually creating jobs and not just higher profits?" What do you think?Well, tax incentives sometimes are considered tax breaks for corporations. You know, the tax incentives are there for a reason, like I just said earlier, to give companies a tax incentive for hiring new people. So we give them the incentive, so when someone goes and looks at Colorado or looks at New Mexico, or should I start my company in Oregon or in California, that we can say, well, we will give you this tax credit if you hire new people and you start your company here. So it's not a tax break, it is an incentive.But the bottom line is, should we audit them? I think that why stop at $2 billion, or her $14 billion? Why not audit and revisit and look at all of the programs that we have in California? The entire $85 billion budget I think we should audit. That's why I'm for performance-based budgeting where we look at each program -- and you don't do that every year or every six months. I think Senator Hollingsworth, as a matter of fact, has introduced, or will introduce legislation where he wants to do that. And I don’t know how many years, if it's every five years or seven years or 10 years or whatever it is, but to have a rotating system where you look at first at health care one year, then you look at the prison system, then you look at law enforcement, then you look at education, that you look at everything where we spend money on. Let's look at it with a microscope and let's audit it by independent auditors and let's check it out. And if some program doesn't work anymore, let's take that money, let's stop that program, let's sunset it, and then let's go and take that money for something else. So I think it's a very, very, very good idea.This question just came in from Sartheorist right here about 49 seconds ago: "Hello, Governor. Simple question; what do you like to do in your free time? Smiley face."Very nice. First of all, since I spend a lot of time working, that in my free time I try to spend time with the family. I have four children. Two of them are out of the house most of the year now because they're in college, in Georgetown and at USC, but my two sons are still at home. But now, during the summer vacation, again they all will be home.And what we like to do is we play tennis, we go out on bike rides, we go on motorcycle rides, we go swimming, you know, we visit friends. In the winter we do a lot of skiing. The whole family skis because I'm a ski fanatic, I love skiing. So we go skiing up in Sun Valley or in Mammoth or Squaw Valley or any of those places and have a great time. Or we travel around. We also like to take them to educational places like a museum where you can explain something. When we go to Washington we take them to a museum, or to the cemetery.Or like just the other day I took them to a cemetery to explain to them why we have Memorial Day, what does that mean. You know, how did we get to this place, that we have the most successful country in the world, the greatest country in the world? That this had to be defended, people fought for this country, fought for the freedom that we have and fought for the liberty that we have and all of the things, the greatest things that we have, that people died for this. And it's very important for kids to see that and to see the gravestones and to see the ceremony and all that.So those are the kind of things. It changes from one day to the next, or from one weekend to the next, if you're in town or out of town and so on.And then, like I said, I work out. I work out every day. I work out in the morning. Like this morning, I got up at 6:00 o'clock, read for an hour here in Sacramento, and then I went out on a bike ride right along the river, which is always wonderful, to ride for an hour and burn off some calories. Then at night I work out with the weights. So I try to do different things all the time.And that answers a question we had from Sage251: "What would give better results, the stair climber or the elliptical machine?" Do you have a quick answer on that? Which do you prefer?I like this, to be maybe the governor and the personal trainer for the people. First of all, I believe that you should not do one versus the other, because they each one have a certain quality. If you do the same thing every day for your body the body gets used to it. The body builds a defense mechanism and therefore it doesn't have as much effect anymore. So you have to always, what I used to call in bodybuilding, the "Shocking Principles," which is you shock the muscle. So if I do curls with a barbell for one week, the next week I will do it with a dumbbell, the next week with a machine, with a cable machine. You always change things around so the muscle never gets used to any particular exercise.And the same is with the cardiovascular training. They always say go and go out running for 10 minutes, then do the Lifecycle for 10 minutes, do the Stairmaster for 10 minutes and do the elliptical for 10 minutes. Just bang, bang, bang. Or go swimming for 10 minutes.Just change things around so that you hit it from every angle. Every exercise does something good for the body, but in a different way. Like, how can you say a Stairmaster is not as good as the elliptical, when the Stairmaster if very important for building thigh strength? So if you want to go skiing in the winter you should do the Stairmaster every day, but not exclusively. Do also the elliptical and other exercises.The most important thing, of course, is to do something every day. You know, don't even get into this three times a week, or two times a week or so. You don't eat two times a week, you don't sleep two times a week, you sleep every day. Therefore exercise every day, eat every day, do everything every day. It's as simple as that. That's' always been my rule.That's a good message to end on, Governor. That's all the time we have. Is there anything you want to say to your Twitter followers?No, I think that I just want to say that it's great to talk to them directly. I want to do more of those kind of things. It's pretty much like when I walk around on the street and people come up to me with questions. You know, I try to answer them. And this is what this is, except here you can reach so many more people. And I always enjoy Twittering and getting the messages back from people and getting suggestions many times. So it's terrific, so I'm going to do more. I'll be back.MR. MCLEAR:
Thank you.
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