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LWV League of Women Voters of California Education Fund

Smart Voter
State of California (Alpine, Amador, Calaveras, El Dorado, Lassen, Modoc, Mono, Nevada, Placer, Plumas, Sacramento, Sierra Counties) November 2, 2004 Election
Candidates Answer Questions on the Issues
State Senator; District 1


The questions were prepared by the League of Women Voters of California and asked of all candidates for this office.

See below for questions on Budget Crisis, Education, Water, Health Insurance

Click on a name for other candidate information.   See also more information about this contest.


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

Answer from Roberto Leibman:

Simply? Spend less than it gets. In reality it is a lot more difficult than that. We need to stop scaring businesses away from the state. We must put a serious dent in the spending by removing many current functions of government.


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

Answer from Roberto Leibman:

Make it easier for parents to choose and use alternative educational resources. Public education is a disgrace, more public education isn't the answer. Give parents who are not using the public education system their money back.


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

Answer from Roberto Leibman:

Get the government out of the way and allow market forces to take effect, if we don't have enough water, making the cost of water less than it really is just hides the problem and makes it worse. Of course, I firmly believe polluters should be strongly penalized... at the source.


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

Answer from Roberto Leibman:

As we've seen with education, creating a bigger bureaucracy to deal with problems doesn't work, more and more money is spent on administrating healthcare, dealing with government regulation, and less and less on the healthcare itself. Though it is not a proper function of government, people need to take some responsibility, somebody HAS to pay for the healthcare cost, people need to stop looking at insurance as a resource for everything that ails them, insurance was originally a way to protect oneself against catastrophic incidents, when health insurance pays for everything the costs of healthcare get artificially inflated, particularly because the patient is far removed from the economic consequences of deciding between one procedure or another.


Responses to questions asked of each candidate are reproduced as submitted to the League. 

The order of the candidates is random and changes daily.


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Created: December 15, 2004 13:39 PST
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