BUDGET CUTS SPELL DISASTER FOR THE POOR WELL-OFF GOVERNOR HITS VULNERABLE IN THEIR POCKETS AND THEIR PANTRIES.

Byline: Bob Erlenbusch and Jay Levin Local View

GOV. Arnold Schwarzenegger is a man to whom ``cut'' means a scene is to stop. As the ``director'' of California who pledged to be governor for all people, the first ``scene'' he's chosen to end is state services for millions of impoverished Californians - real people, with real needs - and this in the face of an existing statewide poverty crisis.

Unfortunately, no stunt doubles will stand in and take the pain for disabled children and seniors, nor suffer for hungry families. And the deaths to come won't be fake.

In aiming so many proposed cuts at the poor, the candidate who promised ``no business as usual'' is blatantly playing from the same script as former Gov. Pete Wilson - make those most vulnerable pay.

The new cuts are astonishing. The governor would terminate vital nonmedical therapy and programs for 626,000 mentally and physically impaired, mostly children. For the elderly poor, blind and disabled who can't fend for themselves, he'd eliminate Medi-Cal.

He'd make cuts in cash support payments, and cut off in-home and transportation aid to 75,000, leaving them to their own, mostly nonexistent devices. The hit would be especially hard for thousands of working poor ($7.50 an hour) adults who assist the elderly and would lose their jobs. Many would end up on public assistance.

There's more hardball misery.

Food stamps for tens of thousands of hungry families would go, as would a significant chunk of the stipend ($704 a month for a mom with two kids) that barely houses nearly 2 million mothers and children, forcing many into homelessness.

And health care will be far harder to obtain, with reductions in Medi-Cal payments to doctors and a freeze on the Healthy Families program (which candidate Arnold enthusiastically promised to expand to meet intense need among children, whom he professes to care about deeply).

For poverty-area students looking to improve their lot in life, it's ``hasta la vista, baby,'' as essential college prep programs would also go.

The timing is alarming.

California is already deep in a poverty, hunger and affordable housing disaster. More than 4 million Californians, more than 25 percent of them children, currently live below the federal poverty line. In some counties, the official figures are at Depression-era levels of 30 percent.

Hunger is epidemic, especially in Los Angeles County, which leads the country in numbers and percentage of hungry people. According to the Center on Hunger and Poverty, 1.3 million Californians go hungry regularly and 4.4 million are ``food insecure,'' meaning their next meals aren't assured and the quality may be unhealthy. One third are children.

During the campaign, sticking to his feel-good script, Schwarzenegger sidestepped questions about cutting poverty programs. He promised a happy movie ending where no one gets hurt but bad-guy politicians and wasteful bureaucrats.

Imagine if he'd spoken his Terminator intentions: I will protect the wealthy and balance the budget on the backs of children in wheelchairs, hungry and homeless families, and disabled seniors.

Living in his Brentwood mansion with, count 'em, six Hummers and his ``liberal'' socialite wife and Oprah ready to provide cover for his moral failures, there's hardly the psychic space for a shiver of conscience to disturb the happy scene of Hollywood Arnold saving California.

Wife Maria Shriver actually had the nerve - and PR presence - to ask to help at a Thanksgiving food pantry when her husband's intended food stamp cuts became known - cuts that will force innumerable desperate folks to pantries for inadequate food supplies. (Overwhelmed pantries meet only 10 to 20 percent of the food shortages of their customer-base, the working poor, and are lobbying against the ``let-them-eat-cake'' budget.)

The only Californians as morally challenged as the governor are those of us who will turn a blind eye to this latest form of molestation. Hopefully calls will pour in telling him where ``the people'' really stand, and asking legislators to cut this scene from our budget picture.