Federal budget ills don't bode well for Schwarzenegger.

AS Arnold Schwarzenegger tackles California s huge budget gap, his top priority is clear--a federal bailout, if his pal George Bush will oblige. "The key thing," Arnold told Newsweek, "is to get help from the federal government."

And the key to securing this help, Arnold seems to believe, is a fact he is brandishing as if it held magic powers. It tams out that for every dollar Californians pay in federal taxes, they get back only 77 cents in federal spending and benefits. Last year that imbalance topped $50 billion.

Surely the president is unaware of this injustice! Thus Arnold's apparent strategy: Just cut me a check for half, Mr. President, and we'll call it a day. That's more than fair--and presto, I'll produce a budget surplus without breaking a sweat.

By the time you read this, Bush will probably have informed Arnold that with his own record-breaking $500 billion federal deficits, he's not in a position to plug California's budget gap.

What will Arnold learn from this?

It's a deeper question than it seems. Implicit in Arnold's argument is the notion that a state ought to have a neutral "balance of payments" with the federal government. Yet the main reason for California's imbalance is that we Californians earn higher than average incomes, and with a progressive federal tax code, this means we pay higher than average taxes.

How far will Arnold want to push his logic of fiscal neutrality between jurisdictions? What will happen when Beverly Hills, for example, tells Arnold its balance of payments with central Los Angeles is negative, and demands a rebate? Pushed to its conclusion, the idea that every jurisdiction should be able to "get" as much as it "gives" ultimately descends into a philosophy of atomized self-sufficiency.

But if government means every man for himself, Arnold's pledge to preserve education funding will end up in tatters; his call for after-school and health insurance programs for poor children will never be funded.

Odds are that Arnold's 77-cent fact is just a talking point, not meant to reveal the new governor's deepest values. But once Bush has rebuffed him, Arnold might consider two more things. First, the advisers who have peddled that fact as if it were persuasive are not giving him the full picture. And second: Budgeting is more about political philosophy than about numbers.

In this regard Arnold should learn not from the Reagan administration exiles in his kitchen cabinet, but from Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who invented the state-federal "balance of payments" analysis two decades ago to show how badly New York was getting the shaft.

Moynihan got Harvard to put out an annual study that cataloged what Arnold has just discovered. Wealthier states like California, New York and New Jersey pay far more in federal taxes than they get in benefits or services from the feds, while poorer states like New Mexico, Alabama and Mississippi show big "surpluses."

The difference is that Moynihan didn't suggest it should be even-steven because Moynihan was a liberal. "There is a national idea" behind this pattern, Moynihan wrote, "which is no more and no less than that we are all in this together."

Instead, Moynihan used the gap to argue against federal policies he felt would damage New York's economy. After all, he could say, we're already paying far more in taxes--can't Uncle Sam at least not screw up our economy in return?

The notion that "Americans are all in this together" is the idea Arnold unwittingly undercuts with his call for a federal bailout. But my hope is that Arnold does think we basically are in this together. "Compassionate" rhetoric aside, George Bush's domestic agenda shows he believes exactly the opposite.

A showdown may therefore loom. Arnold Schwarzenegger may be many things, but wouldn't the biggest surprise of all be if Arnold turned out to be our next Pat Moynihan?

Matthew Miller is the author of "'The Two Percent Solution: Fixing America's Problems in Ways Liberals and Conservatives Can Love" and co-host of KCRW-FM's "Left, Right & Center."