Mark Paul is a Midwesterner by birth, a Californian by choice. Born in Ames, Iowa, in 1948, and mostly raised in Madison, Wisconsin, he moved to California to attend Stanford University and there he has stayed, prisoner to sunshine.He has been a writer, reader, and politics and news junkie from almost the beginning. In junior high he put up a perfect score on the Time magazine current events test. In high school he devoured John Locke and the Federalist, leavened by Twain and Hemingway. Too young to work for pay, he took his first summer job as a full-time volunteer in the campaign headquarters of the Republican candidate for the Wisconsin U.S. Senate seat held by William Proxmire. Owing to some weakness at the top of the ticket, 1964 did not turn out to a banner year for GOP candidates, but losing didn't matter--Mark was hooked. Analyzing, writing about, and practicing politics and policy have been his life's calling.After finishing college and completing all but three dissertation chapters of a Ph.D in U.S. history at Stanford, Mark launched his career in political journalism as associate editor of Inquiry, a public affairs biweekly published by the Cato Institute. That career took him, over the next 27 years, through positions as editorial page editor and national editor of the Oakland Tribune, and editorial writer, deputy editorial page editor, and columnist at the Sacramento Bee, where he won the 2000 Best in the West prize for his editorials on Gov. Gray Davis.He recrossed the river to political practice in 2004 when he was appointed deputy treasurer of the state of California and served as the policy director for the 2006 campaign of Phil Angelides, Democratic nominee for governor. Currently he writes about budgets, taxes, immigration, asset building, and constitutional reform for a wide variety of print and online publications.Mark is father to two sons, Jonah and Aaron, and husband to Robin Netzer, an artist, master gardener, and community activist. They live in Sacramento in a yellow house that can barely be seen behind the jungle of tall grasses, trees, and tomato vines.