Don’t Loan Her Your Car Either

We have marveled in this space about how Rep. Laura Richardson, D-Long Beach, defaulted on three mortgages and then championed a congressional bailout of home loan deadbeats.

Now we learn that she is as dangerous around cars as she is around home mortgages.

The Daily Breeze reports that when she was a councilwoman in Long Beach, she crashed her BMW and abandoned it at a repair shop. She also failed to pay a prior repair bill and violated city policy by driving a city-owned hybrid vehicle 30,000 miles in just one year.

Since Richardson arrived in Congress last fall, she has been leasing at taxpayer expense a “customized” Lincoln Town Car for $1,300 a month from the local Enterprise Rent-a-Car office for travel around her congressional district.

The lease price does not include insurance, which Richardson agreed to pay. According to the Daily Breeze, one of her staffers apparently was involved in an accident in the car on April 1 but “may not have been listed as an eligible driver on her [Richardson’s] insurance policy.” Richardson did not report the crash.

Records show that Richardson owes $83 for illegally parking the Town Car in Long Beach. The ticket was issued on January 23 but the penalty has doubled because the ticket was not paid on time.

In days of yore, folks like Richardson would have been confined to a debtors’ prison. Today, she roams the halls of Congress, making decisions on the national budget.

What Bad Times?

Last year, state taxpayers shelled out $2.1 billion to pay for state employee overtime and extra pay. With California facing a ballooning budget deficit, a nurse at a state prison in Monterey County collected $198,000 in overtime last year, earning a total salary of more than $310,000. A chief investment officer for the state’s pension fund earned $403,000 in bonuses. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, 616 state employees make more than the $212,000 per year earned by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. They include 274 psychiatrists, 48 investment officers, 23 prison guards, 18 nurses and three fire battalion chiefs. A total of 103 state workers earned more than $100,000 in overtime payments. Overtime payments to employees of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation totaled $630 million in 2007—five times more than any other department.

If the governor is serious about controlling the deficit, he will start by cutting back on these outrageous state employee payouts.

Arnold Takes Beating

Last week, Gov. Schwarzenegger took some hard whacks on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “When you ran for governor in 2003,” said moderator Tom Brokaw, “you ran as a fiscal conservative who would change the system, who would bring business-like techniques. Now you are facing a $15 billion deficit here in California. Unemployment is running at about 6.8 percent; you’ve got the worst housing crisis since the Great Depression. If you were a CEO for a public company, the board would probably say, ‘It’s time to go.’” Brokaw also pointed out that the rate of spending by the Schwarzenegger administration has been “about the same as your predecessor, Gov. Gray Davis.”

That is what happens when a “conservative” governs like a liberal.