Matt Mahan

start to tune into this race, hear what the candidates have to say.

I think people's common sense intuition on this is that, yes, we want to elect a Democrat who's going to fight for our values nationally, somebody who understands that Trump is an existential threat to our values and our way of life, and we need to fight through the courts and through the bully pulpit and do everything we can to offer an alternative.

But I also think they understand.

I think this is actually true across Democrats, independents, and moderate Republicans, that in California, for most of our challenges around public schools, housing costs, energy costs, we can't blame anybody else.

We need to take ownership of our mistakes.

We need to take control of our own destiny.

And we need to solve our problems because that's actually the best counter to this populist authoritarian strain in our politics.

Yeah, my view of it is there are a number of other things we should be doing to make the tax code fairer and to make sure that the wealthiest amongst us pay their fair share.

And as you've heard, I'm worried about regressive taxation, income inequality and opportunity gaps.

That's been kind of my whole career is thinking about those issues.

I

And I am not supportive of the wealth tax specifically because I don't think it'll work.

And I think it will actually ultimately burden middle class and working families in California because billionaires aren't going to pay this tax.

Half of them have already left the state since it's been proposed.

We've seen over a trillion dollars of capital flight.

I'm interested in what works.

And what works in this case is, and I know it's harder, but if we're going to be intellectually honest about this, we need to fight at the federal level over things like what should the capital gains tax rate be?

I don't believe you should be able to borrow endlessly against your appreciated assets and never have to pay a capital gain.

That's a huge loophole.

I don't believe Elon Musk should be able to pass $500 billion worth of appreciated stock onto his kids, have it rebased at $500