Early voting is already underway in California (I just got mine in the mail yesterday) so I thought I'd toss this out there in case anyone's interested. Every election we have to sort through a ton of these initiatives. I encourage everyone to read through the fine print yourself, and to turn off the teevee entirely, given the utter dreck that passes for ads and debate out there. For what it's worth, this is how I see 'em.
Every ballot has a collection of themes, this ballot comes down to four: Pot Legalization, Redistricting, Taxes and Budget, and Global Warming:
Legalization
YES on 19
This is a huge opportunity to reverse the decades-long colossal error of marijuana prohibition, and has no credible downside that I can see if you aren’t currently employed growing pot illegally. We need the revenue legalization and regulation would bring, we need the cost savings from not arresting, prosecuting, jailing, and paroling thousands and thousands of otherwise nonviolent people, and we need to cut a major revenue stream out from under organized crime. Right now we already pay any societal cost of drug users, be it stoned driving, teen use or what have you. Prohibition has not ended those things, but is has wasted a colossal amount of budget money and destroyed thousands and thousands of people's' lives (and future earning potential, which means future tax revenue) with the knee-jerk incarceration policies of Prohibition v. 2.0. If 19 passes, cops can spend their time focusing on the crimes they're currently not prosecuting for lack of resources, growers will stop wasting water and electricity and housing growing plants indoors that will thrive outdoors, our national parks won’t have clandestine pot plantations because it can be grown in regular old farms, those who grow pot today will find their profit margins lessened and will pay taxes on what profits they do make, and the international criminal cartels that rely on the drug war-inflated commodity price for what is essentially a weed will have a lot less money to buy guns with. No doubt moral scolds will find something else to get hot and bothered about, they're pretty resourceful people. No downside.
Redistricting
NO on 20, YES on 27
Redistricting should be done by the majority, not these supposedly nonpartisan panels that end up being populated by well-off, well-connected political types in Sac. If people wanted to really reform, they'd ditch districts entirely and go for proportional representation. Anything short of that will necessarily have weird gerrymanders, just as a function of the uneven distribution of people (and political leanings) in this state, compounded by the Voting Rights Act requirements for minority districts. Secondly, it is a hypocritical and cynical GOP strategy for self-titled reformers to retain GOP partisan control of redistricting in Florida, Texas, Ohio, etc. while demanding CA give the GOP an equal seat at the table. It's asinine. Somehow the republic survived gerrymandering in the two centuries between Eldridge Gerry and the last election. This is a solution looking for a problem.
Taxes and Budget
YES on 21, NO on 22, YES on 24, YES on 25
All of these props grow out of the constitutional and budgetary wreckage left by Prop 13, and while none is the silver bullet repeal of 13 en toto that I’d like to see, all attempt to patch up a broken system, to varying degrees of effectiveness. Props 21 and 24 plug holes in the deficit created by Schwarzeneggar’s cuts of the vehicle license fee and the yearly budget hostage crisis, while 25 repeals one key part of prop 13, the supermajority requirement to pass a budget, that has enabled a shrinking rump minority GOP to effectively demand whatever crazy shit it wants in exchange for the state government not going into default. Mostly those demands have come in the form of pointless and cruel spending cuts (which prop 21 would restore for state parks), or tax breaks for wealthy corporate donors of theirs (which 24 would repeal). While the greater structural problem will persist until the ability to set tax rates is also decided by majority vote (or the Democrats manage to cross the 2/3 threshold in both chambers), just getting timely simple majority budgets will be a godsend for schools, state workers, and any business that contracts with the state. Keeping everyone hanging all summer as the usual idiots make their demands (“give us corporate tax cuts or the schools get it!”) is terrible for business, is terrible for anyone who relies on any aspect of state government, and is no way to run a state.
Prop 22 means well, in trying to protect local government from the annual Howard Jarvisite antics in Sacramento, but it will unfortunately cause serious problems in a reality where passing a budget and raising sufficient revenue can still be held hostage by a recalcitrant superminority of right-wing legislators. it is bullshit that the state government regularly steals sorely needed funds from municipal governments in such a painful recession, but walling those funds off will end up forcing even more severe cuts at the state level - quite likely in education - that end up coming back to gut local government from a different angle (especially for towns like Davis, where all major employers are connected to the state govt in some way (UCD, State of California, public k-12 schools, etc.). The dependence of local government on state funds is a direct consequence of prop 13’s freezing of property tax revenue, as is the inability of the state govt to raise sufficient funds to help local governments cover that shortfall. The solution isn’t in building more internal firewalls within the shrinking cage of CA state government - the trap is to force us all to fight each other for the scraps while the powerful interests feast - it is in breaking us all out of the cage we’ve been put into.
Global Warming
NO on 23, NO on 26
Prop 23 has been written about a fair amount, in essence it’s a Texas oil corporation-funded attempt to repeal a law (AB 32) that might cut a bit into their profit margin, and it deserves to be shot down on the merits. The sneaky one is prop 26, which while pretending to be about the great tax and budget battles, is really just a covert way of trying to gut California’s ability to regulate carbon emissions by making any fees or penalties on polluters subject to the same supermajority requirement that has made our state budget into a basketcase. While 23 is bankrolled by Valero and other texas oil corporations, 26 is funded largely by Chevron, Occidental and the California Chamber of Commerce. Both propositions are an assault on California’s burgeoning green tech industrial sector, and an attempt to bind the state economy inextricably to the carbon economy and the oil corporations that fuel it, so that they can continue bleeding us dry. As such, both threaten California's future in an existential sense, both in terms of our dependence on a peaking and increasingly expensive energy source, and in terms of locking in a disastrous set of climate consequences as that future carbon goes into the atmosphere. California is at root an ag state and a tourism state, and climate change will exact painful costs from both sectors of our economy. Don't let the oil corporations steal our future.
originally at surf putah