Gov. Jerry Brown to GOP: ‘Get out of the way’
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Gov. Jerry Brown on Sunday took to the national airwaves to weigh in on the presidential election, arguing that President Obama had laid a foundation for economic recovery and that the country would be better off if Republicans would “get out of the way.”
“Maybe I know too much about this stuff, but we’re in a recovery, a slow recovery, and it’ll keep recovering with any luck,” Brown said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “And if the Republicans would get out of the way and let, you know, the stimulus and the investment go forward, such as the Democrats have proposed, we’ll be better off.”
Brown, who campaigned for governor as a political mediator, has taken a harder public line against the GOP since failing to win a single Republican vote last year for his plan to place taxes on the ballot. Now, he is taking his case directly to voters, having qualified a November ballot measure, Proposition 30, to raise taxes to help close the state’s deficit.
On Sunday, he said California voters face a choice not unlike the one they face in the presidential contest: investment or retrenchment. “This is just math now,” Brown said, echoing former President Bill Clinton’s emphasis on “arithmetic” during his speech at last week’s Democratic National Convention.
If the initiative fails, he said, the state will automatically cut $5.5 billion from public schools and community colleges –- the equivalent of three weeks of school. About $500 million will be cut from universities, he said.
“At the end of the day, vox populi, vox dei. The voice of the people, as they say, the voice of God,” Brown said. “It’s either take the money from those who have even more than we can imagine and give it to our schools or not. And whatever it is, I’ll manage it and we’ll make it work. One way would be better, but whatever way the people decide is the way we’ll go and that’s the way it should be.”
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--Michael J. Mishak