GOP nominee Elizabeth Dionne on her run for Mass. treasurer

Thank you for having me here, Matt.

It's great to be here.

The most important thing to know about me is that my husband and I are the parents of four adult children.

who cannot afford to live and raise their families here in Massachusetts, and neither can any of their friends or their classmates.

We face an affordability crisis here in the state.

Unfortunately, we just became the most expensive state in the nation to raise a family of four.

Need over $300,000 in income to do that comfortably.

At the same time that we are 50th for job growth and 50th for an economic growth and that's unsustainable We are witnessing a hemorrhaging of our 25 to 35 year olds.

It's our state's future It's our tax base and they're going so literally it's my four children They're the reason that I'm running but the other reason that I decided to step forward and do this is that the tax the treasurer is is the fourth most powerful office in Massachusetts, and nobody knows who the treasurer is or what she does.

And so it's really become my mission over the last eight months to educate people about this incredibly important office that has a direct impact on affordability and on transparency.

It's nearly 20% of the state budget.

It's hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer assets under management.

And it's 13 key departments that touch people in a lot of ways that they may not even be aware of.

Yeah, I mean, certainly you mentioned some of your personal background there, but professionally, I mean, what do you think would lend itself well to being the treasurer of the state?

Interestingly, I have the exact same professional credentials as the incumbent.

So, I'm a Stanford-trained attorney, and I've actually spent the last 10 years in local office, most recently on the Select Board in Massachusetts.

So very deep budgeting experience.

And again, the Treasurer's Office interacts very closely with local governments.

The incumbent is also an attorney who was previously on the Brookline Select Board.

So the credentials are the same.

I think the similarities end there for reasons that we can go into.

Sure.

Don't know if you'd like me to go into my personal story at all or where you want to go next.

Yeah, I

mean, we've got miles of tape because this is the podcast.