The Ledger, every show

“As Democrats, we have to own the outcomes we're getting in this state, and for too long, our reflexive answer has been, we need more revenue. If we just have more money, we'll solve this problem. I just don't believe that”

“Mississippi and Louisiana are doing a better job of helping low-income kids get on grade level for reading than we are in the very well-resourced, very progressive state of California.”

“If the Democratic Party doesn't start to wake up and be more responsive to the needs of our constituents and deliver with the resources we've got, we're gonna see the pendulum swing all the way the other way, and you're going to see a MAGA-like movement happen…”

“In short, I think you have to be able to involuntarily hold people for addiction treatment, mental health care.”

“The state has lost most of its refineries over the last decade because we have intentionally regulated them out of existence.”

“I don't think it's realistic for California to create a single state-run free healthcare for all system.”

“The dirty secret of this proposal is that it won't be the billionaires who pay Higher taxes. It'll be middle class and working families who are left holding the bag.”

“They're not getting the help that they need, and part of the reason they're not getting the help that they need is this hyper-partisanship in which California and Washington are fighting rhetorically and politically, and the people who are being hurt are the f…”

“The only practical and ethical solution is for parties to put the hyper-partisanship aside, come together, and come to a grand bargain in which we secure the border. We deport those committing violent crime who are undocumented, and we create a pathway to a le…”

“I will absolutely stand up to protect undocumented residents who are playing by the rules, who are doing the most American thing, and I get all the arguments around lawful immigration.”

“We have increased spending in state government by 75%. Put that in perspective, that's a hundred and fifty billion dollars more this year than six years ago.”

“We have led the state in reducing crime and become the safest big city in the country.”

“We've reduced unsheltered homelessness, meaning people living outside in tents and vehicles by about a third in the last few years.”

“Right now, 75% of the audit recommendations from the state auditor never get implemented.”

“It's spineless politicians who cave to their aggressive demands who are the root cause of the problem here.”

“In San Jose, we had to move away from spending a million dollars a door to build a brand new apartment to get someone off the streets and pivot to buying sleeping cabins that can be deployed in small communities on publicly owned land, hooked up to utilities, …”

“We've added over 2000 shelter beds in my first three years as mayor, and led the state in reducing unsheltered homelessness”

“We're not building condos in California, partly because construction defect liability allows a trial lawyer to come in in year nine of a project And if they see that the paint is starting to bubble, they'll file a suit, and they care about the fees.”

“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.”

“A lot of Democratic legislators, many of whom I know personally in private, will admit that things are broken, that things aren't working.”

“The good news? Two thirds of people say yes. The bad news, the other third, is so deep in the throes of addiction to substances like meth and fentanyl that they can't make a rational decision about their own self-care.”

“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.”

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

“I don't think Elon Musk should be able to pass on five hundred billion dollars of appreciated but untaxed stock wealth to his children.”

“I'm frustrated with a state that keeps spending more and seemingly getting less, which is why I jumped in.”

“I think the state is heading toward an inflection point past which there may be no return.”

“Anybody can sue under CEQA. You don't even have to be a resident of California to sue under CEQA.”

“During the last five years or so, roughly during the pandemic, unemployment claims in California that were fraudulent totaled over thirty billion dollars.”

“I think by an order of magnitude, there's even something bigger here, which is waste and inefficiency, is a system where you just keep incrementally growing headcount, growing the size of programs, growing the grants that we give out to nonprofits, and We're f…”

“Yeah, and I would, just to be clear, as governor, veto even more of these bills”

“The single biggest spender in Sacramento when it comes to advocacy lobbying and elections Is organized labor and particularly public sector unions.”

“Over the last decade, we've had 50,000 people die on our streets in California about Half from overdose and suicide.”

“I think that's fair. I think regulation, Bureaucracy. A set of codes and laws that don't work for people and work for the special interests in Sacramento.”

“We have not created an incentive structure in government to reward actual performance and outcomes. And so we are by default rewarding the performativeness of showing that we're doing such a lot of activity without a lot of impact.”

“And yet we lead the nation in unsheltered homelessness over 40% of the people living outside in tents in the entire country live in California, which is only about 12% of the country's population.”

“With Prop. 36, I was the first Democratic mayor in the state to come out in support of Prop. 36.”

“Texas is providing dramatically cheaper power that is cleaner than California.”

“90% of homeowners, maybe more, can be covered by private insurance affordably”

“As governor, I would create a task force that just focuses on fixing the insurance market, and if the state will invest in vegetation management to reduce the risk of catastrophic loss, you're gonna see premiums go down over the long term.”

“These kinds of price controls don't work in practice as we've seen.”

“The state's population has stayed flat over the last six years. Spending is up 75%, as you point out, and headcount in state employees is up, I believe, over 20%.”

“It's time for California to go through an exercise of zero-based budgeting and say, what are the outcomes we need, and are we actually spending dollars to achieve those outcomes, or are we just funding a sprawling, bloated bureaucracy”

“Getting a hundred and a thousand plus people off of our streets and into shelter dramatically reduces the burden on our healthcare system.”

“Tariffs, yes, I do believe China, this is something I think he's gotten right, has been competing unfairly with the US. I think a targeted approach to tariffs, focusing on that issue, would have made a lot more sense than the general inflation we've seen.”

“I think Governor Newsom has been a bulwark against some of the worst ideas coming out of the legislature.”

“So my sense growing up in an ag town that historically has probably been about a third undocumented is that the primary incentive for the parties to not solve this problem is that a lot of people became very wealthy. A lot of industries did very well by having…”

“Those three other Leading Democratic candidates are vying for the same lane. It is the more of the same lane. It's a platform that says that the answer to our problems is more revenue.”

“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.”