VIDEO: Carl DeMaio — Great Diagnosis, Fake Math

Carl DeMaio is a California Assemblyman running a ballot initiative campaign under the banner of his Contract to Reform California. His flagship bill is AB 23, the Cost of Living Reduction Act. The mechanism: whenever California prices exceed the national average by more than ten percent, state agencies are automatically required to cut taxes, fees, and mandates until prices come down.

He’s also promising twenty-five hundred dollars per year in cost-of-living rebates to every middle-class family in California, funded out of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund.

DeMaio is the loudest, most specific, and most relentless critic of Sacramento’s cost failures in this entire election cycle. His indictment of the political class is largely accurate and difficult to rebut. The benchmarking concept in AB 23 is genuinely interesting — automatic accountability not dependent on any individual politician’s will.

His examples are real numbers. Average ER visit in California: thirty-two hundred dollars. In Maryland: six hundred eighty-two dollars. Average ambulance ride in California: twenty-four hundred dollars. In North Carolina: six hundred sixty-two dollars. That differential is primarily regulatory. He’s right about the problem.

Now open the spreadsheet. California has approximately thirteen million households. Twenty-five hundred dollars per household is thirty-two and a half billion dollars per year. The Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund — the account DeMaio proposes to use — disburses three to five billion dollars annually. That is the entire fund. Emptying it gets you to roughly ten cents on the dollar of his promise.

DeMaio has not addressed this gap in any public forum. The twenty-five hundred dollar figure exists on petition sheets and in press releases. It does not exist in any fundable budget.

When a politician promises thirty-two billion dollars out of a four billion dollar fund, that is not a rounding error. That is the whole ballgame.

The Hedge rating: Best critique of the status quo in the race. The math is theater. Full analysis at The Hedge.