How Matt Mahan Thinks He Can Save California
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Why is Matt Mahan running for Governor of California?
Matt Mahan, welcome to All In.
What factors contributed to California's decline?
Thanks, David. I have no idea who you are. Who are you? I mean, you're a guy who kind of popped up running for governor of California last minute. How'd that come about? And who is Matt Mahan?
Well, David, like everybody, I'm frustrated with a state that keeps spending more and seemingly getting less, which is why I jumped in. But to back up, I grew up in a little farming town here in California, a town called Watsonville, where your strawberries come from. I do work in Watsonville. Driscoll berries, you know it well.
I got greenhouses, yeah.
How do public sector unions influence California politics?
Yeah, exactly. Working class family, mom was a teacher, dad was a letter carrier. My lucky break in life was getting into a great college prep high school on a work study scholarship. I took buses about two hours each way, worked my way through high school and college, and came back as a public school teacher through the Teach for America program. Always was very community oriented, was interested in politics, wanted to know how to make our city, our world a better place, ended up in the tech sector and spent about a decade building civic tech tools to help people navigate their democracy. What did you build?
What is the state of California's housing crisis?
I was involved with an early Facebook application called Causes and then went on to start a platform called Brigade that was sort of like LinkedIn for voters. And the whole premise was to build grassroots bottom-up power by connecting voters around issues they're passionate about, outcomes they want to see, and help them organize to hold their elected officials accountable. After about a decade in the civic tech space, our company was acquired. I decided to run for city council, and I went out and knocked on 10,000 doors, got yelled at for a lot of things that I wasn't necessarily responsible for it, but I got a real feel for the common sense of the residents of California who would ask questions like, if I'm paying $20,000 a year in property taxes, why haven't my local roads been paved in the last 15 years?
And I thought that made a lot of sense. So I went to City Hall to try to find out.
How dysfunctional is California and how did it get this way?
Pretty bad. I'm really worried, which is why I jumped in. I think the state is heading toward an inflection point past which there may be no return. 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.
How are energy policies affecting California residents?
Nevermind 75% better, many of them are flat or down over the same time period. So there is a... real lack of accountability in government. 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. 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. And we're just not seeing that level of accountability in our state government.
What are the implications of California's pension liabilities?
Is this theft?
Where does the money go? $14 billion. Who has that $14 billion today?
It's contractors, it's lawyers. Some of it has gone into actually building the project. But belatedly, what happens in California and the reason we can't build, we can't do big things anymore, is that we've got endless process, years of environmental review, the most litigious environment imaginable. Anybody can sue under CEQA. You don't even have to be a resident of California to sue under CEQA. And so you just get years of litigation, bureaucracy. When it comes to housing, just to slightly switch topics, the fees that cities can assess, one-time fees can add 20% to the cost of a project. So we've bureaucratized the state to the point where it's total paralysis. We can keep spending more and more and not getting anything for it.
It's like, I'm trying to understand as a citizen and a taxpayer, I pay a 53% tax rate living in California. I pay my federal tax and my temporary California tax, which I've been temporarily paying for 11 years.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Why is Matt Mahan running for Governor of California?
0:00–0:02
2
What factors contributed to California's decline?
0:02–0:28
3
How do public sector unions influence California politics?
0:28–1:00
4
What is the state of California's housing crisis?
1:00–2:18
5
How are energy policies affecting California residents?
2:18–2:50
6
What are the implications of California's pension liabilities?
2:50–4:01
7
How does immigration reform play into California's future?
4:01–5:41
8
What solutions does Matt Mahan propose for California's challenges?
5:41–1:16:52
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