IMPORTANT ISSUES
Reducing the cost of living.
Rising costs are a serious issue: no Californian should have to pick between food, gas, or their rent. Meanwhile politicians keep spending wildly, which causes prices to go up, and raising taxes, including our Gas Tax! My solutions to help make life more affordable:
- Stop reckless government spending that causes inflation so that your prices will go
down again
- Put more money in your pocket by stopping the billions of new taxes Sacramento
has proposed, eliminate the Gas Tax, and give the $97 billion budget surplus back to
people as the biggest tax cut in state history.
- Reduce unfair fees and regulations on new housing, so that construction will be
cheaper and there will be enough affordable housing to purchase or rent.
Making our schools work for everyone.
California’s K-12 schools are 44 th in the nation. This is a disgrace, and it steals opportunity from young people, particularly Black and African-American students. We need to make sure a student’s education isn’t determined by where they live or how wealthy their family is. My solutions to help make our schools work for everyone:
- Make it easy for parents to get students out of failing schools and into good public or
charter schools. Give parents more voice in what students are taught and more
information about how their school is doing compared to other schools.
- Pay teachers like our future depends on them, because it does. Reform tenure so
that we can reward good teachers and retrain or dismiss bad ones.
- Come to bipartisan agreement that our schools need to be safe zones where gangs,
drugs, and weapons are prohibited, and our students kept safe.
Taking real action to help the homeless off the streets.
The truth that we all see day after day is that many if not most of our homeless are addicted to drugs or alcohol or suffering from mental or physical disabilities. It’s also the truth that the homeless camps that have formed are dangerous, with drug dealing, prostitution, and other
crimes commonplace. My solutions to help start to solve the homeless crisis:
- Take the billions of dollars we are currently spending on failing homeless programs
and put them towards full time, in-house drug and mental health treatment centers,
and make it easier to require participation. Conduct a public audit of the billions we
have spent thus far on the failing homeless programs.
- Require each city to have about the same number of clean, safe shelter beds as they
do homeless people. Have services and help available there, on-site. Then prohibit
outdoor camping. This can be done immediately.
- Clean up the homeless camps and filth right now and do not allow the camps to
come back. Make sure our police have the tools they need to keep us and our
property safe while we help get the homeless off the streets and into housing,
treatment, and new jobs.
Keeping people and property safe again.
Do you feel as safe as you did 5 years ago? Sacramento has let tens of thousands of dangerous felons out of prison early, lowered penalties for drugs and violent crime, and all the while ‘progressives’ try to Defund the Police. I don’t believe allowing crime is progressive or liberal. My solutions for restoring safety in our community:
- Fight the Defund the Police crowd tooth and nail. Nothing is more dangerous than
reducing the number of police on our streets while violent crime increases.
- Stop letting violent felons out of prison early. If we need more space in prison to
keep violent felons off the streets then we need to open more prisons, or stop
closing the ones we are in the process of shutting down.
- Put the victim first again: restore tough penalties for violent and property crimes so
that criminals know there is a price to be paid if they want to harm you or steal your
property.
Protecting our environment while producing lots of energy
We all want to protect our environment, and slow climate change, but the cost of energy – gas and electricity – is starting to financially cripple California families. We can protect the environment while producing clean, cheap, and abundant energy. My solutions to making sure we protect the environment and have affordable energy:
- Make sure California stays beautiful: making sure our ocean and other waters are
clean, our air smog and chemical free, our communities safe from dangerous waste
or past pollution.
- Open the floodgates to clean, green energy! Provide incentives for green energy
companies of every kind to relocate to California and let them provide good paying
jobs and compete for our business while we wean ourselves off fossil fuels.
- Take a stand as the national and global leaders that we are on climate change. Re-
open our nuclear power plants in isolated parts of the state, with a plan for
disposing of the small amounts of hazardous waste that they generate.
Cleaning up Sacramento’s waste, fraud, and abuse
In the last couple years our news has been full of stories about billions of dollars of waste in Sacramento. The Unemployment Office, for instance, paid out over $31 billion in fraudulent claims while Californians, unemployed because of COVID, couldn’t get the money they needed to buy groceries or pay the rent. They don’t care about wasting your money… I do, and here are my solutions:
- Require a public, nonpartisan audit of every department’s spending and
effectiveness every year, and publish the results so we can see if we are getting our
money’s worth.
- Increase transparency by forcing the state to do what other governments do: put all
spending on line, in real time, on an easy to use website.
- Prosecute elected officials and government workers who use taxpayer money as
their own private piggy bank, staying at fancy hotels and eating at expensive
restaurants while we pick up the tab.
Preventing fire and providing water.
The state has totally failed in stopping massive and lethal fires and in making sure that we have enough water. This is unacceptable: they have the know-how and they have the money. Our desert communities will shrivel up and blow away without water: we need to start securing it right now! My solutions to ending the fire and water problem:
- Declare that we are on a war-footing with fire, and act like it. That means standing
up to radical environmentalists and clearing dead trees and undergrowth from our
forests, and requiring people to build fire breaks around their homes and
businesses.
- Use the water storage money that voters authorized many years ago to actually
build water storage – right now. We need to have enough water stored to be able to
handle several years of drought conditions.
- Pull out the stops on developing new sources of water – such as desalinization plants
– and double down on water distribution all around the state so that those places
that may have more water can get it to those places who have less.
Giving every person good healthcare options and outcomes.
Every person deserves healthcare piece of mind. No one should be denied insurance because of a pre-existing condition. Serious health conditions shouldn’t drive anyone into bankruptcy. Private healthcare, where you get to pick your doctor, is better for you and cheaper than
government run healthcare. Those are my basic principles, and my solutions to healthcare are:
- Prevent government run healthcare. A government worker shouldn't decide what
doctor you see, and when. Further, we can’t afford the largest tax hike in California
history (approximately $400 billion dollars!) that government healthcare would cost.
- Increase tuition assistance for doctors and nurses, and offer to forgive all or parts of
school loans if they are willing to relocate to communities that need more health
care professionals.
- Make sure everyone has access to professionals that practice preventative health,
access to mental health counseling, and affordable prescription drugs. Lower overall
healthcare costs by reducing unfair government rules and promoting more
competition among providers and insurance companies.