The Californer - U.S. Congressional Candidate Pete Verbica on High Costs in California: It's Time to Build a New American Ladder

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"Poor policy choices are not acts of nature. They are reversible."

SAN JOSE, Calif. - Californer -- Peter Coe Verbica, Republican candidate for California's 19th Congressional District and a fifth-generation Californian, examines each broken rung on "The American Ladder." He explains the structural forces that have pushed homeownership, family formation, and economic mobility beyond the reach of the next generation and many legal immigrants. Verbica cites two primary culprits — a Federal Reserve whose monetary policies substantially eroded the purchasing power of the U.S. dollar and four decades of anti-growth governance in Sacramento. He argues that the crisis is the result of identifiable policy decisions — not inevitable fate.

"California is not merely a passive victim of national forces," Verbica said. "It is, in significant part, the agent of its own predicament. CEQA has been weaponized to block housing for decades. PAGA has made California a uniquely hostile place to employ people. Voters approved billions in infrastructure bonds and watched Sacramento squander them. The high-cost rail debacle alone has done more damage to the public's willingness to fund new infrastructure than any single policy failure in a generation. And high sales, gas, and income taxes further burden those least able to shoulder them. Meanwhile, the Fed's unbridled expansion of the M1 money supply deliberately inflated asset prices as a matter of policy. Existing homeowners benefited. Those trying to buy a new home did not."

Verbica, a former adjunct economics professor, identifies compounding structural forces that trap much of our next generation and many new immigrants to a cycle of perpetual renting:

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* the Fed's asset-inflating monetary cocktail;

* forty years of real wage stagnation;

* demographic lock-up of housing inventory as owners age in place;

* institutional and foreign-capital buyers crowding out first-time purchasers;

* CEQA and PAGA regulatory overreach crimping new construction;

* chronic deferral of water, sewer, and grid infrastructure despite voter mandates;

* pension and OPEB debt forcing the state, counties and cities into a taxing death spiral;

* the predictable exodus of major employers and the middle-class taxpayers to Texas, Florida, and Nevada;

* the long-term strategic and human costs of global outsourcing; and

* the fraying of the nuclear family and dimming of core Western Civ values, which provided historic stability and guidance for the next generation.

"No single rate cut, zoning tweak, or tax credit fixes this," Verbica said. "More than forty years of compounding pressure require four things Washington rarely musters: honesty about what went wrong, accountability for the institutions responsible, a serious supply-side agenda on housing and infrastructure, and a regulatory environment that stops driving employers — and the taxpayers who fund everything else — out of California."

Verbica draws on the economic thought of Hayek and Adam Smith to argue that the path forward runs through individual freedom to adapt, rather than centralized mismanagement (as illustrated by the $126 Billion high-cost, low-return rail project).

Verbica acknowledges that Singapore's experience demonstrates that capable, disciplined government and market dynamism need not be in conflict; by way of example, he cites their world-renowned healthcare system as one which the US should consider implementing.

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He argues that artificial intelligence, properly deployed, could democratize expertise and personalized instruction at scale — but only if paired with the kind of institutional competence Sacramento has conspicuously failed to supply.

"The next generation's claim on a productive, affordable California depends on the willingness to correct these failures, both in DC and in Sacramento," Verbica said. "That is what this campaign is about. Most of our parents climbed the American Ladder. My campaign is about building new and better ladders, so that the next generation can reach new heights."

About Peter Coe Verbica

Peter Coe Verbica has advanced to the general election in November 2026 as the Republican candidate for the United States Congress, California's 19th District. He is Principal and Managing Director of Silicon Private Wealth®, a CFP®, and a fifth-generation Californian from a Central Coast ranching family. He holds a J.D. from Santa Clara University School of Law, an M.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a B.A. from Santa Clara University, and is a graduate of Bellarmine College Preparatory.

He is endorsed by the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association PAC (https://www.hjta.org/about-hjta/paccommittees/).

Illustration: Rendered by Grok 2026 with inputs by P. Verbica.

Paid for by Verbica for Congress