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As governor, I would create a task force that just focuses on fixing the insurance market.
We spend $8 in fire response and recovery for every $1 we spend on prevention. And there are plenty of urbanized areas that are at risk because they're proximate to dense vegetation that the state has not taken ownership for clearing.
If you're willing, and you may not be, but if you're willing to remove those trees within 100 feet of your home, you should pay a lower premium. If you prefer to have the trees there, you should pay the higher premium. So more granular pricing, allowing appropriate pricing of risk is just really important.
We have to rebuild the private marketplace. 90% of homeowners, maybe more, can be covered by private insurance affordably. And we have to rebuild that part of the market by bringing them back, allowing them to appropriately price risk and creating more granularity.
I also think over time, as EV adoption increases, we'll have to find a smarter way of charging a basic user fee so that people who use the roads pay to maintain them.
My proposal is that we, to start, temporarily suspend our gas tax to provide immediate relief to working families who are paying the price for a war that they didn't ask for. And they're disproportionately paying the price. I would temporarily suspend it.
We should be paying EV owners today in the middle of the day, strongly incentivizing them to charge their vehicles the middle of the day when power is so cheap and abundant in California that we sometimes pay Arizona to take our excess solar and then have them plug in at night to power the grid and get through that roughly 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. evening peak where we've got to start firing up gas power plants because there just isn't enough power on the grid.
Texas is providing dramatically cheaper power that is cleaner than California.
The state has lost most of its refineries over the last decade because we have intentionally regulated them out of existence. And so what's actually happened is we still import oil and gas. We've just pushed refineries. We have the cleanest, best regulated refineries with some of the highest paying jobs in the sector. We push that out of state. Now we're importing the same amount of gas from thousands of miles away. It is dirtier. It has a bigger carbon footprint. We lost those good high-paying
So the macro cost structure of California, the highest housing costs, second highest energy costs with the highest gas prices, which disproportionately hurts working people. An educational system that is preparing far too few of our children for the jobs of the future.
There's the veto, the bully pulpit, just kind of naming and shaming is really powerful, executive orders, the appointments. I mean, the governor appoints 3,000 people who run all of these commissions that have incredible discretion over how to implement regulations. But there's no doubt that ultimately you need the legislative branch to change. And I think that a lot of Democratic legislators, many of whom I know personally and private, will admit that things are broken, that things aren't worki
I just visited a modular construction factory, factory-built housing. They can bring down the cost per unit by 20%, speed up overall project timelines by up to 50% by just industrializing the production of housing. So we need to pull the cost down. We should be able to drop the cost on a per square foot basis by at least a third with actions that are within our control as regulators.
For every two jobs an economy creates, you need at least one home. Part of the reason the Bay Area and particularly Silicon Valley is so unaffordable for working people and we're seeing displacement of working families is that over the last 20 years, this incredible economy here, the engine of innovation for our country and really the world, has created about eight jobs for every one new home we've built. That is a completely unsustainable ratio.
We have to pull the cost out of building because as long as the state of Colorado can build the exact same home at half the cost of what it is in the Bay Area, we're never going to be able to compete. So I want to see more housing in absolute terms get built. We need to start moving in a better direction. We've gone from about 100,000 units a year to about 80,000 a year. You go farther back, it was 150,000 a year.
We don't have a money problem in Sacramento. We have an incentives problem. We have a structure that allows us to keep shoveling more money into things that aren't working.
There's emerging research right now that shows that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of hospice providers who may or may not exist.
During the last five years or so, roughly during the pandemic, unemployment claims in California that were fraudulent totaled over $30 billion. That is well documented.
Just take high-speed rail. If a startup took 20 years, spent $14 billion, and didn't deliver a product, people would have been fired a long time ago.
We have increased spending in state government by 75%. Put that in perspective, that's $150 billion more this year than six years ago. And as far as I can tell, none of the outcomes have gotten better. Never mind 75% better. Many of them are flat or down over the same time period.