Californians have been electing big-spending ultra-liberals to the state legislature for a long time, and any alert observer could not help being scared to death over the way the folks in Sacramento were spending money as if tomorrow would never come.

Well tomorrow's here and it's time to pay the piper for the siren song of spend-and-elect; he's been playing for a long time.

As for Arnold Schwarzenegger, it must be said that the man Californians elected to terminate the Democratic Party's march towards bankruptcy led by then-Gov. Gray Davis soon began to capitulate to the state's delusion that spending the taxpayer's money with reckless abandon is a dandy way to reach Utopia.

I can't say he didn't try. Faced, however, with a hostile legislature and an electorate that saw the state's government as a never-ending source of benefits, he was fighting a half-hearted battle he couldn't win.

As a result, he turned his attention to his future prospects of becoming Greenhouse Gas Czar of the world, a job currently held by Al Gore.

The significance of the result is that in the first occasion when Americans had to vote since the November elections, Californians voted overwhelmingly on whether we should raise taxes to solve our financial problems in a recession and they decided to go red.

Acknowledging the defeat of the ballot measures, Schwarzenegger told reporters in Washington that he received the voters' message "loud and clear: an overwhelming majority of people told Sacramento, 'Go and do your work yourself, don't come to us with your problems...'"

He added: "The message was clear from the people, go all out and make those cuts and live within your means."

He should have realized that fact long ago.