California Insider

“In the COVID era people ended up on unemployment and the federal government send out about $100 billion to California and a huge amount of it, about $55 billion, was lost to criminal gang. Fraudster…

“Too many people are going to the FAIR Plan. Nobody should want to be in the FAIR Plan; it’s meant to be a temporary market of last resort. It’s an unvirtuous cycle. Under the law, any deficiency tha…

“She destroyed hundreds of deputies’ careers; they used to call her the ‘badge collector.’ The effect of that was catastrophic to the organization. People started leaving in droves. No one wanted to …

“We’re talking about homeless housing located on some of the most expensive land on Earth, occupying what used to be a much-needed parking garage, at a cost of $2 million per unit. The value of that …

“What we should understand about Los Angeles is that everybody complains about homelessness. Online, on Twitter, on Nextdoor... Everyone has something to say. But very few people have taken it upon t…

“You can literally walk into a retail store every single day of the year and steal $949 worth of merchandise and you will never do a minute in jail. No compounding consequence. The voters I believed …

“I constantly see these white buses coming down full of illegal immigrants who are claiming asylum. Not through the port of entry—they’re coming through the fence, cutting the fence, around the fence…

“I’ve sent an open letter to [California Gov.] Gavin Newsom. Not only have we seen the cost of almost everything go up exponentially in the last few years, but also faced new regulations and mandates…

“It really has been the biggest dam removal experiment in modern history. People who were very much in favor of dam removal are now beside themselves because they had no idea this would be the outcom…

“It’s being sold to the voters as treatment. But you’ve got $2 billion going into housing that can be for people who are still using hard drugs. If you have a building with, let’s say, 40 units, and …

‘It’s almost like we’re living in an open-air mental health facility. There are people walking down the streets; you don’t know if they’re going to shoot you, stab you, punch you, spit on you... And …

“The goal is to densify every town in the state. To densify it—so that‘d be walking around, not driving. In some places, it doesn’t work. But this whole policy has been applied as ’one size fits all'…

“The school adopted my daughter’s new identity, which was a boy, changed her records to be male name, called her that in class. They told me I was unsafe. So they were safer for my daughter. This is …

“It is like working at a zoo, and they’ve opened up every single cage: to the bears, to the lions, to the panthers, to the giraffes, to the elephants. And you got the correctional officers like: “Oh …

“Who is leaving? That’s probably the most worrying aspect of all of this. The people who are leaving are the most productive, what I call the seed corn of California—people who are going into family …

“I remember that year; there was just so much shooting going on. Kids would sleep in bathtubs to avoid stray bullets.”

Siyamak sits down with Pastor Paul Baines from East Palo Alto. He will share how …

“You’re going to see housing supply dropped. Investors are no longer looking at the city of LA because it’s too risky. Why would you sell a property, if you would have to give all your profit to the …

“In the last three years, we’ve had a net outflow of 1 million people. I don’t want to leave; I want to help turn the state around because I think sooner or later the voters are going to wake up, and…

“Opening a restaurant seems simple, right? You never anticipated that you would expect ... Every single restaurant owner I talked to, is in a PAGA lawsuit. None of them are less than six figures.”

Cal…

Siyamak sits down with Gabriel Petek, California’s legislative analyst. He shares with us why California is facing such a huge budget deficit and how it may last a few more years. He also shares what…