I grew up in Oregon and moved to the San Francisco Bay Area after getting a degree in electrical engineering at Oregon State. I’ve lived in the Bay Area all of my working life and in Mountain View since 2002 and I absolutely love what California and our special region in the bay have to offer. After a successful 30 year career in technology, most recently with Apple, I realized that my passion was not in technology, but in helping my coworkers fix problems and teaching them how to do it themselves. With that insight, I decided to take the risky and unusual leap to step away from my job and find a better way to pursue my passion.
Traditionally California struggles to meet its budget, but because the state relies heavily on capital gains taxes for funding, we have benefited from budget surpluses for the last two years. That doesn’t mean we should lock ourselves into expanding existing programs or new long-term programs that will handicap California when revenues are light. We should return as much of these surplus tax dollars as possible to Californians and strategically allocate the rest to crucial areas of need in the state. Budgeting is never as easy as spending but must be done to regain our financial solvency. I’m also an advocate of incremental budget reductions in bloated areas of state government.