Former Mayor of Stockton and Democrat Michael Tubbs is running for lieutenant governor after spending the last five years as special adviser for Governor Gavin Newsom on economic mobility and opportunity. He is also the founder of the nonprofit End Poverty in California (EPIC), which according to its website, hosts “listening sessions” for poor people and local activists and then advocates for policy change.
As mayor, Tubbs garnered national attention by implementing a Universal Basic Income pilot program that gave $500 a month to 125 residents of Stockton. Some of the candidates Tubbs will be facing in the June primary include Republican Gloria Romero, and Democrats Fiona Ma and Josh Fryday.
I met with Tubbs over Zoom to discuss his campaign. Though lacking in much direct authority, as lieutenant governor, Tubbs would sit on various consequential boards.
I asked Tubbs about his agenda as a member of the Board of Regents of the UC system and the Board of Trustees of the Cal State system if he were elected. According to Tubbs, he would focus on affordability, addressing the student and employee housing shortage by encouraging schools to build on land they already own. He would also advocate for a tuition freeze and argued that any necessary cuts should be directed at administrative bloat.
Whether he could actually get done is an open question given his limited influence on these matters. In a position such as lieutenant governor, where much of the office’s duties involve being only one of multi-member boards, radical positions tend to be largely drowned out by the majority, rendering the office even less effective. It is therefore prudent to learn how thoughtful and radical our candidate truly is. That said, his ideas for the higher education boards were among his more modest policy ideas.
Tubbs as a candidate is a bit stranger than most given that he holds several radical positions – he has implemented and advocated for Universal Basic Income programs and reparations for the legacy of slavery.
I asked Tubbs about his support for UBI and noted that critics have argued that funds are better used to address the root causes of poverty, such as access to jobs and housing, rather than just handing out cash.
“I don’t think there’s any magic bullet or panacea for all the problems facing our society, sadly. But I do know … that guaranteed income helps with the issue of lack of cash. It also makes those other problems more solvable. So, yes, if I was just saying all I’m going to do is guarantee an income, I would understand the criticism. But as you mentioned, I’ve been the leading champion on housing reform.”
Despite his UBI advocacy and national acclaim as mayor, Tubbs lost his reelection bid in 2020 after a single term.
I wanted to get Tubbs’ reflection on some of the purported reasons he was not reelected by the city of Stockton. He was accused by some of being too preoccupied with his profile on the national stage, looking past the city onto bigger things while Stockton struggled with many chronic problems. I asked if he thought that any of it was fair.
“I get for some folks in a community like Stockton … it was uncomfortable to have a mayor, particularly a mayor from the south part of the city, particularly a mayor who was 26 and Black, who was getting national attention,” said Tubbs. After explaining that his administration reduced homicides and placed the city on a healthy fiscal footing, he continued, “So, no, I think a lot of that work is politically driven. A lot of those critiques are politically driven and myopic and short-sighted.”
To be sure, much of the criticism originated from a local blog that was simply looking to smear Tubbs with exaggerated claims.
However, that blog was not the only part of Stockton voicing similar concerns. To many in the city, Tubbs was indeed too preoccupied with non-city matters. It’s difficult to blame the young Tubbs for embracing the extra attention just as it is difficult to blame residents for feeling that they were not being given full priority as evidenced by him receiving only 43% of the vote during his reelection bid compared to 70% four years earlier.
As much as Tubbs might like to think it was just “jealousy” as he described it, he did have two documentaries made about himself by the age of 30 and another documentary produced by his nonprofit features him heavily, including a highlight reel of some of his many appearances on national T.V. shows.
On the other hand, perhaps it was simply that he was leveraging the extra attention to spread the word about his favored causes. I can’t speak to Tubbs’ internal motivations but the people of Stockton obviously came to their own conclusion.
We moved on to reparations, another one of Tubbs’ controversial positions. On what sort of reparations Tubbs would support and if he’s in favor of cash payments, he explained, “I think that if there’s a way to calculate what was owed then absolutely. But I think my biggest takeaway from the reparations report that the state did was even outside of cash payments, there’s a bunch of stuff that can be done to repair, not imaginary harms, but real harms. So I would argue you should probably start there.”
While there is a respectable moral case to be made for some form of reparations, Tubbs appears to be excessively fixated on policy ideas that would bankrupt our state if actually implemented.
According to a policy blueprint released by his nonprofit and endorsed by him, he’s in favor of UBI, cash reparations, affordable child care, baby bonds, down-payment assistance, seed grants for small businesses, higher payouts for unemployment, and paying employers to hire less attractive candidates – Tubbs’ vision is to brute force the issue of poverty by having government tap into an imaginary bottomless pot of gold.
The state is already facing a structural deficit of tens of billions a year and the paper did not specify how these programs would be paid for. Fortunately, if elected, Tubbs would have nearly no say over any of this.
In his foreword for his nonprofit’s paper, he wrote, “California has an opportunity to be the nation’s testing ground for ambitious policies that can dramatically reduce poverty and fulfill the promise at the heart of our nation’s ideals.”
Californians are not guinea pigs for fanciful progressive policies.
The state needs grounded politicians who deploy sensible and modest solutions, which it seems Tubbs cannot provide.
Rafael Perez is a columnist for the Southern California News Group. He is a doctoral candidate in philosophy at the University of Rochester. You can reach him at rafaelperezocregister@gmail.com.