Issue Position: Meet Joan

Issue Position

Joan Buchanan has precisely the financial expertise that Congress needs right now to get our economy moving again.

She learned early the value of money and lived early the American Dream. The daughter of a waitress and bartender, Joan helped count the pennies, dimes and quarters of her mom's waitressing tips so that they could eventually afford a $2,500 down payment on their home. She followed up on her promise to her parents to get an education, becoming the first in her family to graduate from college.

As a business leader, Joan honed her financial and analytical skills at Delta Dental, becoming one of the fastest rising women in the company and Director of Commercial Operations before the age of 30. There, she led the drive to apply innovative new efficient management practices - saving the company money and improving the quality of its service to customers.

She left the private sector to raise her five children and in the process became one of the San Ramon Valley's most effective community leaders, taking action to solve our toughest problems.

She was elected to the San Ramon Valley School Board to take on a $7 million dollar budget deficit and struggling student achievement. Joan immediately went to work. She focused on higher standards for both teachers and students, and used her financial expertise to balance the budget by going through the district's finances- line by line. It's one reason why the California Teachers Association awarded her the State Gold Award.

Today, over 94% of the district's graduating seniors attend college or university, and the San Ramon Valley School District now ranks among the top 5% of all school districts in California. And when Joan left the School Board, the district has a rainy day fund of over $11 million.

Elected to the California State Assembly just six months ago, Joan has been a strong voice for fiscal sanity, voluntarily cutting her own salary by 10% until the California budget is balanced.

In Congress, she'll use her financial expertise to enact policies to create jobs and strengthen our economy, including tougher oversight of the banking industry, stricter controls on credit card companies and more aggressive enforcement of securities laws. Joan will work to restore our long-term economic growth by investing in our schools so that our kids are prepared to compete in a global economy, and improve America's competiveness by finding solutions to our national health care crisis.

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