James Talarico

And I see it.

I just became an uncle for the first time three years ago.

My baby niece, Jane, is going to turn three in two weeks.

And I just see how she is absorbing everything around her.

that everything is fascinating to her and that she's actually, she's able to pick up things so quickly because in that period, your brain is so much more flexible and malleable.

And so I think having that high quality early child education available to every single kid would be a game changer and it would reduce costs because you can either pay for this stuff on the front end or the back end.

and the cost for remediation in school the cost for criminal justice the cost for for welfare programs all of that i think you could and it's not just me who thinks that all the studies that have been done on this show that the return on investment for early child education programs is off the chart it's the best use of our money it's the best bang for our buck and it could transform our education system uh it could transform our economic system uh it could transform this country

The last one I'll mention, I know you asked for one, but the last one I mentioned is housing.

I, as a millennial, I think Gen Z in particular,

a lot of us feel like home ownership is something completely out of reach.

And owning your first home is such a critical part of the American dream.

There's like a sequence to the dream and the home is right there at the beginning because if you don't, if you can't afford a home, it's hard to start a family, have kids, put down roots, build wealth.

And so the fact that we have locked young people out of that American dream, I think it should it should be an urgent priority for all of us to start addressing housing in particular.

And I've done it here in Texas.

We passed a major bill to allow for something called single stair housing complexes.

This is a kind of housing that's built in almost every other country around the world.

But our outdated building code here in Texas doesn't allow for it.

And these are things like condos, right?

Kind of an easier entry point into home ownership.

And it was just a regulation that didn't make any sense anymore.