-By Tim Cavanaugh

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger won’t leave office for another five months, and I’ve already got breakup remorse.

Time and again, Reason has criticized the Gubernator. Time and again, I have criticized the Gubernator. But as he closes out his time in office with yet another budget cage match against the Democrats and their union backers, I feel honor-bound to present the case for Gov. Schwarzenegger. Here are some details I collected while working on an upcoming print column:

While government grew under Arnold, it didn’t grow quite as fast as usual. According to the state controller’s office, the total number of state employees under the discretion of the governor (i.e., not including legislative aids, University of California system employees, prison guards, etc.) is 237,654 right now, up from 222,866 in 2004, the first full year of Schwarzenegger’s administration. That’s about a 6 percent increase over six years.

Similarly, general fund spending, which was $71 billion in 2003, was is now around $86 billion — a relatively modest 21 percent increase over seven years. Considering net population growth that’s still around 400,000 people a year, you might even make the case that general fund spending is about where it was when he took office. In keeping spending down, the governor has been a major beneficiary of the recession, which allowed him to make actual reductions in 2008 ($11.4 billion), 2009 ($31 billion) and probably 2010 (a projected $12.4 billion)

“If I were making the limited-government case for the governor, I’d probably brag about the spending,” says Joe Mathews, author of California Crack-Up. “I just don’t think that’s a case he wants to make. I don’t think there was some grand plan in the way he kept spending increases down. As a governor he’s got a better record than Jeb Bush or Sarah Palin, but he doesn’t want to talk about that.”

In politics, the discretionary stuff is always the easy part, but Schwarzenegger also tried — and spectacularly failed — to challenge the power of public sector unions and roll back the crushing entitlements they have locked in. His 2005 slate of ballot initiatives — which I found underwhelming at the time — nevertheless threw a lot of light on the outsized political power of government employees.…

Read the rest at Reason.com.

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