As California readies for October 7, it matters less what the candidates say than what the voters demand.

What the electorate has every right to demand at this important juncture in California’s history is a debate on the merits about the state’s economic future.

In no instance should that debate turn on the exhausted polemics of taxes vs. spending. That red herring has distorted and misdirected California’s (and the nation’s) political debate for 25 years.

I am neither an economist nor a politician. But as an educator, I am certain that our future economic health depends crucially on investment in our schools and universities. As an electorate, therefore, we should require from each of our gubernatorial candidates a carefully reasoned, comprehensive plan to recover our fiscal health, including an overhaul of our tax structure and legislative machinery. We cannot regain or expand our economic strength, we cannot steer a proper course in education or in other transcendent social spheres, without thinking anew about how we govern ourselves.

It is said that the storm and crush of a political campaign do not permit the formulation of serious, politically workable public policy proposals. Candidates and their advisers, campaigning 24 hours a day, are hopelessly busy and distracted, unable to think through policy with analytical rigor.

In view of California’s deficit plight, however, it is high time politicians traded in their sound bites for rational discussion of the state’s fiscal underpinnings. As a citizen, father, and educator, I want to hear candidates address the subject of long-term investment in our children—which is to say, our economic future. Like you, I want to compel our candidates to confront the very real losses in future productivity we are suffering as a result of grave reductions to the state education budget. Those cuts are false savings, not true savings. They constitute real productivity losses that will stretch far into the future, across generations.

Let us press the candidates to acknowledge--and repair-- the extraordinary damage inflicted on California’s economy and the individual’s pocketbook, owing to enrollment cutbacks at our colleges and universities. Although the California State University system has been accommodating large numbers of new students in recent years, the current budget proposes virtually no enrollment growth. Tens of thousands of students who miss out on college will lose out on millions of dollars in lifetime income, mortgaging their futures, their children’s futures, and the state’s long-term economic potential.

Faced with a $38 billion deficit this summer, the legislature effectively postponed the day of reckoning until next year. Yet, the longer the crisis goes on, the harder it is for state leaders to tackle it. That includes educational officials as well as the governor and state lawmakers. It also includes fiscally-embattled political and educational leaders at the regional and local level, who usually bear the brunt of Sacramento’s budgetary carelessness.

The ballooning federal deficit—now close to half a trillion dollars—also should be a prime issue on the campaign trail when the electorate questions gubernatorial candidates about the state budget. They can no longer rely on “a billion here and a billion there” from Uncle Sam to tide them over the fiscal shoals. The torrents of federal red ink are one more compelling reason to insist that those who aspire to be governor of one of the ten wealthiest economies on Earth do not qualify for office if they resort to the fiscal flimflam brandished constantly in past campaigns.

Probably the worst abuse of, one hopes, past politicians, is the perennial promise to restore fiscal discipline by ridding the government of billions of dollars in reputed “waste.” Nearly 100% of the time, the amount of this waste is wildly inflated. Candidates almost never specify, account by account, just where all this bureaucratic “waste” is to be found, or how it would be eradicated if it were.

The surpassing reason to demand the fiscal truth in this fateful autumn of California’s history is that both major political parties have thoroughly discredited themselves in managing the fiscal crisis that began two years ago. To paraphrase one of America’s Founders, “we see good and wise people on the wrong as well as on the right side of questions of the first magnitude to society.”

Accordingly, the recall will accomplish nothing unless the public demands a change of heart as well as a change of faces.

The author is President of Humboldt State University.