>Arduin flew into Sacramento last week to begin work as Schwarzenegger's unpaid budget auditor. She's on loan from Florida after helping Republican Gov. Jeb Bush find ways to cut state taxes by $8.1 billion over the past five years. In the process, however, Florida eliminated money for eyeglasses, hearing aids and dentures for poor seniors and forced 55,000 low-income children onto health insurance waiting lists.<
>"In any state budget in this nation, when you have to start making cuts -- when you have to make big cuts -- you have to look at the percentage of revenues that are allocated to social services," said Jon L. Shebel, president of Associated Industries of Florida, the state's leading pro-business lobbying group. "You're in a major crisis there in California. There's no way to not take money out of social services, and that's what Donna does."<
>Advocates for that state's poor disagree. This year, they have railed against $26 million in state Medicaid cuts that eliminated the hearing, dentures and vision programs for 235,000 people. They also have sharply criticized the 4.3 percent reduction in state money for poor children's health insurance that resulted in the waiting lists in Florida.
"Her philosophy -- and it's at the direction of whoever her boss is -- was pretty strict along the lines of cut and slash on budget programs, particularly in the human services area," said Karen Woodall, one of Florida's leading social service lobbyists. "There have been lots of serious cuts proposed across the board in a lot of those programs, and that's going back several years. It was always done in the name of efficiency and streamlining, and the rhetoric always followed that it was not going to hurt the delivery of services, which in fact never was true."<
http://www.whoseflorida.com/watch_out_california.htm