Next Round

Our annual former PRI speechwriters analyze President Biden's State of the Union Address: Senior Director of Education Lance Izumi was chief speechwriter to Gov. Deukmejian and Attorney General Ed Meese, Vice President of Marketing and Communications Tim Anaya was speechwriter to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and numerous legislators and COO Rowena Itchon was a speechwriter for Gov. Pete Wilson and a researcher on President Reagan's speechwriting staff.

Our guest this week is Rea Hederman, executive director of the Economic Research Center and vice president of policy at The Buckeye Institute, a free market think tank based in Ohio. Its new report, "Net-Zero Climate-Control Policies Fail Farmers and Families" looks at the impact the Biden administration's climate-control policies will have on farmers and families. Farm operating costs is estimated to increase by 34%, annual grocery bills will increase $1,330, and the cost of basic food items will increase more than 70%. We discuss with Rea Hederman how California's farmers and families could be particularly hard hit.

Our podcast guest this week is Steve Hilton, the keynote speaker at PRI's 2024 Sacramento Ideas in Action Conference. Steve was a top advisor to UK Prime Minister David Cameron, a contributor at Fox News, and now running "Golden Together" a group focused on new ideas to increase affordable housing in California. Steve gave a rousing talk to our audience, rallying our guests to continue the fight for limited government and free market ideas.

Our guest this week is Paul Tice, a Wall Street veteran and now an adjunct professor at New York University's Stern School of Business. His new book The Race to Zero provides a detailed rebuttal to the case for sustainable investing from the perspective of a long-time Wall Street analyst, investor, and now a finance professor. He argues that sustainable investing doesn't aim to generate high returns for investors or to further ethical goals such as saving the planet; rather, its proponents want to control of the world's financial system in order to ensure that the allocation of capital and investments across markets is politically favorable to establishment interests.

Our guest this week is Stanford University historian Jennifer Burns. Professor Burns has just published her new book "Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative." Milton Friedman was a tremendous supporter of PRI and our work, giving lectures and attending many events. We invited Prof. Burns, who specializes in U.S. twentieth century history focusing on the state, markets, and capitalism and how these play out in policy and politics, to discuss the life of one of the greatest economists of the 20th century and his groundbreaking work.

Our guests this week are Steve Greenhut, director of PRI's Free Cities Center and Wayne Winegarden, senior fellow in business and economics. The two have joined forces to produce PRI's latest mini book from the Free Cities Center, "Giving Housing Supply a Boost: How to Improve Affordability and Reduce Homelessness." They discuss the policies that have made homebuilding prohibitively expensive in the state, contributing to the high cost of housing and increasing homelessness.

Roger Simon wrote novels and screenplays before co-founding and becoming CEO of the pioneering blog aggregation and news and opinion website PJ Media (formerly Pajamas Media) in 2005. He's best known for the Moses Wine detective series, which have won prizes from the Mystery Writers of America and the Crime Writers of Great Britain. In his latest book, American Refugees: The Untold Story of the Mass Exodus from Blue States to Red States, he profiles people like him who got fed up with the politics, taxes, etc. in states like California and decided to move across the country to red states like Tennessee – states that they thought would be a welcome haven from their former leftist home states. We chat with Roger about what he and others found when they reached their destination.

Our guest this week is Jeff Anderson, president of the American Main Street Initiative, which publishes political and public policy research by scholars and writers. Jeff has held many prominent positions in presidential administrations, including director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics at the Justice Department. Jeff was also a professor at the Air Force Academy. We chat with Jeff about the upcoming presidential elections, his thoughts on the candidates and their prospects, and his insights on the electorate.

Listen as PRI's All Stars – Wayne Winegarden, Lance Izumi, Sally Pipes, and Steve Smith – respond to Gov. Newsom's much-anticipated 2024-25 state budget plan. They discuss Gov. Newsom's much lower state budget projection and spending priorities, the budget's impact on K-12 education, whether the Governor will suspend the controversial $25 health care minimum wage increase, and how it will affect efforts to increase public safety in California.

PRI's All Stars - Rowena Itchon, Tim Anaya, Lance Izumi, and Kerry Jackson - are back with their choices for 2023's biggest winners and losers, in our annual tribute to the McLaughlin Group. We hand out our choices for best and worst ideas of the year, the bummest wraps, and give our predictions for who is destined for stardom in 2024.