League of Women Voters of California Education Fund
State of California (Alpine, Amador, Calaveras, El Dorado, Lassen, Modoc, Mono, Nevada, Placer, Plumas, Sacramento, Sierra Counties) November 2, 2004 Election
	Roberto Leibman Answers Questions Candidate for State Senator; District 1

Read the answers from all candidates.

Questions & Answers

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

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?

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?

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?

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.