Governor Says He’ll Survive Budget Bruises : Politics: Tells national TV audience recession is largely to blame for tax hikes. He and Speaker Brown defend state against charges of decline.

Gov. Pete Wilson, appearing on national television Sunday, likened his first state budget experience to Gen. George Custer’s confident and ill-fated ride into the valley of the Little Bighorn in 1876, but said the difference was that “I’ll survive.”

And so will California. On that point, Wilson and Democratic Assembly Speaker Willie Brown--veteran of nearly two decades of state budget battles--were in agreement.

Neither accepted the premise of a special edition of the ABC television news program “This Week With David Brinkley” that California no longer is the national indicator of positive trends and developments, from movie culture to politics.

During Sunday’s show, which aired from Los Angeles instead of Washington, Brinkley focused on California issues rather than national issues while playing host to Wilson, Brown and author and commentator Ben Stein.

“This is now a scary place,” said Stein, citing escalating crime, pollution, gridlock and an exodus from Southern California to other states such as Oregon or less-crowded and less-troubled areas of California.

Stein said California’s Proposition 13, which slashed property taxes and severely restricted future increases, illustrated the selfishness of California voters who refuse to take responsibility for solving the state’s problems.

A key part of the program’s theme was that the state’s $14.3-billion budget deficit this year came about as a legacy of the anti-tax crusade that Californians launched in 1978.

But Wilson argued that at least two-thirds of the deficit resulted from the economic recession and the rest stemmed from a structural problem in which automatic spending increases rose faster than revenue increases.

The Republican governor rejected an argument that he was “eating crow” in accepting $7 billion in tax increases to help balance the budget without getting the workers’ compensation reforms he had sought from the Democratic-controlled Legislature.

Proclaiming himself the victim of an ambush, the governor said no one could have expected during the election campaign last fall that the budget deficit, then estimated as low as $1 billion, would soar so high. Or that he would have to support tax increases.

“No, I’m not eating crow any more than Custer was,” Wilson said. “Like Custer, I didn’t have quite the troops, didn’t have the votes and the clock ran out.

“I’ll survive. That’s the difference.”

Brown, in a separate interview, lamented that he might have to give up his seat in 1996 because of Proposition 140 term limits passed by California voters last fall. Given the problems California faces, Brown was asked, wouldn’t he prefer to do something else in 1996 after almost 30 years in the Legislature?

Not at all, Brown said.

“With the new governor on the scene and the problems of California as being described, it becomes really a challenge to reverse that trend, and I want to be a part of that.”

Brown said the delayed budget agreement will provide an investment in a better California. He said the tax increases and budget reforms should give the state fiscal stability for four or five years unless there is an unexpected escalation of state program costs as there was in the prison system during the 1980s.

Brown said he believes the key to California’s economic growth is a better education system that produces a well-trained work force.