League of Women Voters of California Education Fund
San Francisco County, CA November 2, 2004 Election
	Jonathan Scott Marvin Answers Questions Candidate for Member of the State Assembly; District 13

Read the answers from all candidates.

Questions & Answers

1. What does California need to do to address the current budget crisis?

The state takes a significant portion of your income and spends it on maintaining its sprawling bureaucracy. We should reign in spending by cutting all but the most essential functions of the state government.

2. What should the state's priorities be for K-12 education? For the Community College System?

If I am elected to the Assembly, my priorities for the education system will be to:

1) Get the state out of the education business, and return control back to the counties (and the counties should in turn return control to the neighbourhoods of which they are comprised).

2) Encourage the counties to focus on teaching our K-12 students: a) critical thinking skills, so they can effectively think through the complex problems of adult life in a logical manner and b) mastery of the fundamentals (reading, writing, mathematics, and the scientifc method), which will enable them to rapidly assimilate advanced materials easily.

3) Strengthen the Community College system by providing each college with indepence from the state: relaxing requirements and regulations and developing financial independence and accountability.

3. What measures would you support to address California's water needs?

Water (like the wind and the sun) is a public resource and must be responsibly shared by all. We must work to assure that polluters of our water and aire are held 100% accountable. Furthermore, we must decrease water consumption, not by regulation, which encourages cronyism and corruption, but by free market pricing, which rewards conservation with lower prices. A tiered system could be applied, in which the price of water increases as a function of usage. Notably, corporations and farms cannot be given a free pass or larger allotments - they are not citizens, individuals of flesh and blood are.

4. What should the Legislature be doing to address the needs of Californians without health insurance?

Employer-sponsored health insurance is a vestige of the beginning of century when employers had to attract employees with lucrative contracts negotiated by newly formed labour unions. Today, less than 15% of the employed population has a union membership, in large part because the government has been given the responsibility of protecting the labour force. Clearly, the government is not doing its job. We can either hope that those in charge in Sacramento suddenly decide to be accountable, or as I would suggest, we can return that responsibility to the citizens. Instead of letting some bureaucrats decide how much we should earn and what our benefits should be, I propose that we eliminate the state imposed contract requirements. The first action of employers will undoubtedly be an attempt to cut wages and benefits. However, knowing that the conditions of their labour contract are solely their responsibility, workers will undoubtedly choose to re-unionize and fight for higher wages and benefits.