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Shubham Goel
for
Governor of California
Bio
Shubham Goel is a 22 year old Virtual Reality Manager in San Francisco, California and a candidate for Governor of California. Goel graduated from University of California, Los Angeles with an Economics and Film degree. He has working experience in software, entertainment, nonprofit and virtual reality companies including Dream Out Loud , HTC Vive and Local Roots. Shubham is of Indian descent and his hobbies include tennis (varsity player), literature, mountain biking and cinema.
Why I am running.
I am a 22-year-old running for governor of California as an Independent (no party preference)! I am running for governor because I want to show people that the everyday person can make a difference. All you need is courage, plan and a will to stand up for what you believe in. I am an everyday person, born and raised Californian, who passionately wants to fix the state’s problems for all Californians that our inefficient state government will not.
The first thing I want to do to help the water crisis is to create tax cuts for farmers who switch their irrigation methods to drip irrigation, as drip irrigation is 30 percent more efficient than flood irrigation with water conservation. It's important to focus on the agricultural part of water usage in California because the agricultural industry uses 80 percent of our water. We must create a board that oversees the implementation of the funds from Proposition 1. We have about $9 billion in funds or bonds from Proposition 1 to spend on our California water projects, but we've only spent 2 percent because of bureaucratic delays. I also think desalinization is huge for California since we border the ocean and have about 10 desalination plants. Israel was able to turn a place that was completely desert-driven to a country where they have leftover water to export. I want to also take our current desalination plants and expand them with brackish-friendly water technology, as this requires less energy to convert into fresh water and is therefore cheaper.
California housing: One of the most important things I want to fix is the housing crisis in California. Local zoning, outdating laws, long approvals, and massive lack of housing has caused prices to astronomically soar and cause long-term California Residents to leave the city. A Mckinsey Study states we need 3 million more housing units by 2025 to keep up with capacity. The first thing we should do is to allow 100% residential development on vacant commercial zoned properties as many of these properties have available space and land. LA does this and they are the fastest growing housing production in California right now. Also, we must reduce the approval/rejection time of housing projects to 6-12 months so that local jurisdictions can make quicker decisions and building can be completed quicker. The Permit Streamlining Act is an act that punishes groups for delaying development building through permit allocation but there is no real enforcement for this bill so I will give this act a punishment of a $30,000 fine for 3 repeat offenses and a loss of local authority for development projects for a 4th. I also strongly support and propose an amended Senator Wieners SB 827 bill that allocates for 4-8 story transit housing within .5 miles of transit in San Francisco. I would like to amend his bill to include tech companies that have more than 2,000 employees, and tech companies that are coming to California with 500 +employees. This will now compensate for these companies bringing all these jobs without creating housing for them. This solution will create millions of housing units for California, lower the price of the housing market and increase mobility in California as more people will use transit. Another amendment I have is to remove this policy to include bus lines as bus lines are constantly changing so this will not be a stable way of building.
Healthfair: Healthcare has several inefficiencies that can be improved which will lower costs and provide better care for the people of California. The first thing I will do is mandate that the government releases health care data of willing Medicare and Medical patients into a public database so that California health insurers who use artificial intelligence can use the data to predict health situations of new patients much better. This will lower costs as a whole. I will also make the insurance companies charge at least 30% less for all virtual health appointments vs. in-person visits to encourage more people to use these types of appointments and to provide a greater access of healthcare for people regardless of where they live. I will build one Health Care form that every provider can use with their data and is a centerpiece of data holding for all providers. With a centralized form, that is data compatible and all providers being pushed to be compatible with, we will have a higher set of awareness from the patients end on medical records and much easier mobility from one provider to another provider. Also, I will mandate that every single health care insurer provides a free IOT (internet of things) health monitoring medical device to patients. The patient can choose a device from an assortment of options and these devices will provide real-time data to the doctor and to the patient themselves. This will cut health care costs dramatically as the patients will now be able to actively monitor their health much better from anywhere while also having a faster more streamlined connection with their doctor & digital records.
My Platform
1. Board of Regret (Regents):The governor of California should no longer have the power to appoint the 18 regents for the nine UC campuses. The members of the Board of Regents will be elected by the students of the UCs. This will make the Board more accountable, transparent and representative of the UC students and campuses they reside over. This will fix disturbing issues like Janet Napolitano, the president of the UC system, hiding $175 million last April from students, the board mishandling funds and regents being financially corrupt.


2. GovBook: All office holders in California will have a transparent digital profile on the governor’s website. This will show their economic interactions for the past 10 years with regard to money and donations they have received from any sources, including the people who control them and investments they currently have. It will also include the platforms they advocated for during their election cycle and will comment on their progress toward completing them. This will keep all of them accountable with their decisions, corruption and ineffectiveness and give the people of California a much better idea of whom they are being represented by.


3. Ax the tax and let’s relax: We are in a budget surplus of about $6 billion and now it is the time to reward the grieving Californian taxpayers. We don’t need more tax revenue but much better allocation of our budget. I will help enact huge tax cuts for California and lower regulations on small businesses to encourage economic growth. Sales tax will go from 7.25 percent to 5 percent. Top marginal income tax rate will go from 13.3 percent to 4.9 percent. Property tax rate will go from 0.75 percent to 0.5 percent.


4. Social Medusa (Media): We must dramatically improve the mental health of Californians. Social media companies have used the variable rewards effect to hook us to use their platforms (the same psychological tricks that casinos use to create addicted gamblers). As a result, everywhere you go, people are on social media sites for hours and hours. This has made people generally unhappy, and our mental health has suffered. I will ban social media usage for kids in K-12 schools across California and encourage workplaces, schools and our government to advocate for less time on these sites and more time outdoors. We will measure happiness with quarterly happiness surveys to California residents and learn from the data what we can do to improve happiness. As governor, I will also encourage and incentivize people to spend more time outside. We will offer different monthly treasure hunts in local districts for groups of 2 or more where we will give digital clues to them on finding the location of the “treasure”.The team that wins each treasure hunt will each get 20% tax credits for the rest of the year so these treasure hunts will be great at getting people to go outside and work together as a group.



5. The Great High Speed Railway Trainwreck: We must defund the high speed railway. The high speed railway train is the most inefficient project in California. I will defund and cut the project completely for California. The budget and timeline dramatically changes every couple of years. The budget was $40 billion in 2004 and now it’s reported that the budgetis over $77 billion. We were assured that private investors will pay a significant part of this train, but not many private investors have stepped up, which means the burden will continue to fall on the taxpayer. I will take a fraction of that budget and build new freeways, add lanes and expand the BART line, which will actually help with the extremely long commute time for workers and with traffic mobility.


6. Venture California: We will create a venture capital fund of $100 million that will invest in California companies that help fix the water shortage problem, housing crisis and healthcare epidemic. Water has become an extremely scarce commodity that California is in desperate need of for droughts, fires and farms. We must use innovative strategies with these funded companies, such as desalination. An increased demand for housing and outdated regulations has destroyed the housing market and made affordable housing nonexistent for Californians. We must pursue efficient building strategies with companies to effectively increase the supply of housing in California. Lastly, we must invest in companies that will develop and create the next generation of health and medical devices. This will improve health and cut health care costs.


7. Hollygood (Hollywood): Hollywood is one of the biggest and most successful industries in this world and contributes so many jobs and growth to our economy. Many film productions in Hollywood are leaving to Louisiana and Georgia and to other countries to film because of our unfriendly tax laws. The California Film Commission (CFC) has successfully granted $330 million in tax incentives per year to different film productions in California. In the first year, the CFC saw $1.5 billion of direct-in-state spending as a result of those tax incentives. The commission is obviously working at keeping productions in-state, so I would like to increase this fund to $600 million a year to double down on something that is working well for such an important state industry.
© Shubham Goel for Governor 2018
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