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Each election I research and analyze the propositions on the California ballot to create this voting guide, and they represent nothing other than my own personal view of these measures. I do this analysis on a non-partisan basis, but that doesn't mean I have no opinion. I do, but I believe it's transparent (note that transparency means only that I claim no hidden agenda, not that I'm trying to be unbiased).
I generally have no connection with any group supporting or opposing any of these propositions.
My main intent is to get to the bottom of these issues, knowing that the real purpose is not always evident. Once uncovered, I apply a mainly libertarian eye to them.
I'm more interested in examining the issues thoughtfully than I am in getting you to vote the way I do, so I hope these pages help you understand the issues in front of us.
I hope my thoughts are helpful.
Other resources:
Important Note: if you are tempted to say "The hell with it" and just vote "no" on all of them, please do not. An uninformed vote, even a no, may have an unintended consequence that you don't want.
Either educate yourself on the measure, or leave that spot blank. Really. This matters.
Note for 2024: the gap in proposition numbers is because legislative measures start with 1 and count up, while those created by the citizenry (referenda and initiatives) start at 30 and go up. This is supposed to make it easier for us to tell which is which, though I am not sure who really cares that much.
Click each link for the rationale for each position.
| Proposition | Source | Result | My Position | Description / Title | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 Prop 2 |
Legislature | Yes | 57% | No | School Bonds |
| Prop 3 |
Legislature | Yes | 61% | Yes | Constitutional Right to Marriage |
| Prop 4 |
Legislature | Yes | 58% | No | Water/Wildfire bonds |
| Prop 5 |
Legislature | No | 44% | No | Approval Threshold on Bonds for affordable housing |
| Prop 6 |
Legislature | No | 45% | No | Prison labor |
| Prop 32 |
Initiative | No | 48% | No | Raising the Minimum Wage |
| Prop 33 |
Initiative | No | 39% | No | Rent Control |
| Prop 34 |
Initiative | Yes | 52% | Yes | "Rx Drug Spending" |
| Prop 35 |
Initiative | Yes | 67% | No | Medi-Cal Funding |
| Prop 36 |
Initiative | Yes | 70% | No | Crime Sentencing |
Prop 2: School Bonds
This measure would authorize $10B in bonds for K-12 and community college construction and renovation.
The projects themselves don't appear controversial: there are formulas for how to divide the money, with the legislature and governor choosing which projects to fund. There don't appear to be any requirements about "climate change" or any of the other social-engineering distractions that so often hitch a ride for measures of this type.
Proponents appear to be mostly operating in good faith, though do make some dubious claims that this will somehow enable access to more affordable college education. Protip: college is not expensive because of the buildings.
Opponents are generally arguing against more debt and spending, and point out that school attendance has been in decline at all levels in California for a while now, and that if it's "only" $10B then California should have just included this in the $288b state budget.
Also, anything spent on local schools requires a local match, which means more bonds and spending at the local level.
I vote no in essentially every bond measure: California now has a bit over $100B in outstanding bonds (not all of which have been issued, which means the money has not been spent), and this is on top of a metric crap-ton of public pension debt.
My Vote: No
Prop 3: Constitutional Right to Marriage
This measure would remove outdated language in the California Constitution defining marriage as only between a man and a woman, aligning with Federal law and court rulings, as well as other parts of California law. It also establishes marriage as a "right".
This is a symbolic measure that will not have any impact on anybody (now or in the future), but there's no harm in removing clearly obsolete—and to some, hurtful—language from the Constitution.
The question then: is there anything else in here that's sneaky?
No: reading the text of the measure merely strikes out the one-man-and-one-woman line, and adds a clause establishing marriage as a fundamental right. That's it.
Proponents make a bigger case for this than is warranted, in part invoking some future boogeyman that will never arrive.
I've also read proponents wanting to remove the stigma of those words in the Constitution, and I roll my eyes at this. I simply do not believe that non-activists care two cents about language when they are busy enjoying their fully legal married lives.
The opponents are clearly driven by the religious arguments, and though I'm sympathetic to a good-faith belief that God intended marriage to be between a man and a woman, they are making a religious argument, not a civil one that this measure addresses.
And even if God is unhappy with same-sex marriage, this is a matter between Him and the participants, and He doesn't need me or the State being His enforcers.
Opponents also makes some silly and hysterical arguments that this will somehow pave the way for child marriage, polygamy, or marrying your cousin. I'm surprised they didn't mention sheep.
This is an easy one.
My Vote: Yes
Prop 4: Water/Wildfire Bonds
This measure would authorize $10B in general-obligation bonds to fund a variety of activities related to wildfires, water availability, and related activities.
This list is from the legislative analyst:
As with Prop 2, the items themselves are mostly not controversial, though the part about building wind turbines offshore has "boondoggle" written all over it.
California has been criminally negligent on managing its natural resources, failing to build water storage facilities to impound rainwater, or to manage the forests properly to avoid wildfire risks. This is in spite of something like $30B in natural-resource bond spending over the last 25 years.
And in any case, this is an improper use of bonds, where you're borrowing for current spending and still paying it back long, long after the thing you spent the money on is gone. Like a 20-year loan for a car: financially irresponsible.
A great example:
Forest Health and Wildfire Prevention
All of this money would support activities to improve the health of the forests and reduce the risk of severe and destructive wildfires.
This would include thinning trees in forests that are overgrown and clearing vegetation near where people live. Money would also be used for other activities, such as helping homeowners make their properties more resistant to wildfire damage.
These look like terrific things to do—especially the forest management—but we will still be paying for them in 2084.
If this were a bond measure squarely for construction of water conservation mechanisms such as rainwater capture, so that all these rivers sending bazillion gallons of water to the sea would instead be impounded, that is something you borrow money for: start now, build for several years, and then reap the benefits for a 40 years or more.
But no, essentially all of the items in this measure ought to be in the current state budget, not saddling our grandchildren with this kind of ephemeral debt.
My Vote: No
Prop 5: Approval Threshold on Bonds for Affordable Housing
This measure would lower the approval threshold for certain bond measures from the current two thirds down to 55%, mainly for propositions related to affordable housing (a similar measure for local school bonds passed in 2008 as Prop 39).
This one is easy: Heck no.
It should not be that easy to raise taxes, and those making a good case that raising taxes will serve a real need should be able to convince two thirds of the voters. If they can't, then either it's not a real need, or the voters believe the government in question is not to be trusted with the money.
Here, as with most measures like this, the proponents are not those who would benefit from the end purpose a tax measure would support (a better school, a new fire station), but instead are those who will directly get the money (fire unions, construction companies).
A key exception are some affordable-housing groups that believe this would help their mission; they at least have a nominally principled position, though in practice these groups often become their own constituency with their own bureaucracy.
My Vote: No
Prop 6: Prison Labor
This measure would rule out forced labor in prisons, which the proponents frequently style as "slavery", as well as forbidding punishment of prisoners who refuse a work assignment. There would be no prohibition against offering good-time credits for those who worked.
This feels like it should be easy to get behind, but I just can't: I went back and forth on this a few times and finally landed on "no".
But "Isn't slavery illegal now?", and surprisingly in this case, no.
Said by the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution:
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime... [emphasis mine]
Allowing a prisoner to work and perhaps learn a trade (I'm thinking of CalFire inmate firefighters), and earn funds for the commissary, or to send home, or pay restitution, certainly contributes to an environment of rehabilitation. This ought to be uncontroversial.
But prison is also about punishment, and I don't believe that a prison gang picking up trash by the freeway as part of their incarceration rises to the level of medieval torture. I'm sure it's not pleasant work, but jail kind of sucks too whether you're working or not.
So I'm simply just not outraged at prisoners having to work while incarcerated, especially since I'm already paying their room and board. This is especially the case for prisoners who have not been behaving. Prisoners working is not slavery.
I would make an exception for work carried out for entities outside the government: if they're doing something on contract for an outside business, then some level of pay ought to be required even if only to forestall abuse by the prisons.
Interestingly, there was no organized opposition to this measure, which makes me suspicious: it's just too neat and clean.
I did find there is quiet concern that if enacted, a requirement to pay minimum wage might not be far behind, and this feels exactly like what could happen in California. Could a prisoners' union be next? This rung my bell.
The argument for this measure didn't suggest any particular abuses beyond repeatedly calling it "slavery", so this tells me this is scratching a philosophical itch rather than addressing an actual problem.
Remember that many criminal convictions carry requirements for so many hours of Community Service, which I believe are universally unpaid. These haven't been controversial at all as far as I know.
Punishment for crimes is not slavery, and it insults our ugly history of those who went through actual slavery to conflate the two.
So, I landed on "no" but could be convinced given an argument better than the weak case presented.
My Vote: No
Prop 32: Minimum Wage
This measure would raise the minimum wage in California from the current $16/hr progressively to $17 and $18/hr at intervals determined by the size of the business (25 employees is the cutoff).
Curiously, this was put on the ballot by one person, entrepreneur Joe Sanberg. I'd never heard of him before, but a brief look around suggests he's a true believer operating in good faith (e.g, not a sneaky Trojan horse for some surprise).
The traditional arguments pro and con are being replayed, with proponents wanting a living wage, and opponents worrying about costs going up, and employment going down.
After the recent California law raising fast-food workers' minimum wage to $20, it had ripple effects throughout the economy: some hourly wages went up, of course, but prices went up and working hours went down, making this not anywhere near the victory for the little guy as the backers would wish you to believe.
The thing I care most about are those at the very bottom of the economic scale, and minimum wage increases are devastating to this group.
It should be obvious that when employers are looking to hire, they pick the best out of the bunch of applicants, but as the minimum wage rises, those at the bottom are farther and farther away from the most qualified in this cohort.
The young man who didn't finish school, and with a criminal record from very bad choices in his youth but is now getting his life together would be readily employable at a foot-in-the-door wage of (say) $10/hr, but when competing with a minimum wage approaching $20, almost everybody will appear to the employer to be a better risk.
This leaves that young man unemployed with no real prospects, and he's the one we ought to be caring about.
I completely understand sentiments wishing to lift up low-paid workers, but good wishes cannot repeal the laws of economics or the law of unintended consequences.
Remember: the true minimum wage is $0.
My Vote: No
Prop 33: Rent Control
This measure would remove restrictions on California cities and counties that prevent them from enacting rent control, though would not enact rent control directly.
Even though I'm a lifelong renter, I'm firmly opposed to this measure because it distorts market signals and ultimately leads to less rental housing being available.
This is the third rent-control measure on the ballot in the six years (Prop 21 in 2022, and Prop 10 in 2020, all backed by the same group: AIDS Healthcare Foundation. More on them shortly.
Yes, rents are very high in California, but this just reflects the cruel confluence of:
Rent control tells landlords that investing in rental housing is a losing proposition, and though renters certainly see a bit of relief in the short term, the longer term means reduced availability of housing over time, as well as reduced quality of the housing that's still in the rental market.
So: why is the AIDS Healthcare Foundation dealing with rent control?
In part this is what happens when advocacy groups achieve their goals: AIDS is no longer the death sentence it once was, and there are many people living normal lives now due to tremendous advances in medicine (brought about in part due to AHF's advocacy).
So rather than declare victory and go home, they're branching out into other issues, leveraging their reputation for matters outside their portfolio. This happens all the time, leading to topic-specific groups morphing into more general (and usually progressive) advocacy.
What's even more interesting is that AHF actually owns quite a large number of properties, and there are recurring reports of terrible conditions, leading some to call them "slumlords".
Some might further suggest that rather than AHF spending all this money backing political causes, they might instead put that money into their own buildings to keep them habitable.
We'll revisit AHF in the next proposition.
What California should be doing is unleashing housing construction, which is so often hampered by beyond-ridiculous permitting requirements and environmental reviews that appear to be designed to make opposition easy by local NIMBY activists, stringing the project along for years.
Stories are legion about this or that "affordable housing" project in Los Angeles that ends up costing north of $1M per unit, and nobody can seriously suggest that this is anybody doing his or her best work. A private developer could have completed the task for way less than half.
This is a feel-good measure that sounds like it's standing up to The Man, but will ultimately hurt all renters (including me).
My Vote: No
Prop 34: Rx Drug Spending
This measure purports to be about prescription drug spending by organizations participating in a certain Federal drug discount program, but I discovered that the details are entirely beside the point.
As I was reading the measure's summary, I kept thinking that it felt oddly specific in a way I couldn't put my finger on, especially when the legislative analyst said there was no way to tell how many organizations this would apply to. My spidey sense was really tingling now.
Then: Aha! This has nothing to do with Rx drugs, but everything to do with shutting down the AIDS Healthcare Foundation's political activity outside their core mission.
Nothing in the measure names AHF, but the parameters are so narrowly defined—organizations spending more than $100M over the last 10 years other than on providing healthcare, and operating a large network of rental housing with more than 500 "high-severity" health and safety violations—that it's absolutely obvious to those in the business that it's solely about AHF.
I hate using the ballot box to target a political opponent, it's a naked power move, but the more I read about AHF founder Michael Weinstein, the more it looks like he's using AHF and their ~$2B/year as a tax-free personal progressive slush fund. That's a kind of naked power move too.
This is AHF's third run at a rent-control initiative, and going after landlords seems particularly galling given that AHF has more than 1000 units of rental housing themselves and a terrible history of running them well: the claim "AHF is a slumlord" feels supported by the facts.
They also spent more than $6M in 2017 to back Measure S, which would put a two-year moratorium on new development in Los Angeles. The measure failed, but it's hard to square shutting down new housing with a healthcare mission.
Even if you don't like landlords and you support rent control, it ought to give you pause that a charity is getting this involved in politics outside of their bailiwick.
I waffled on this a bunch, an ultimately reluctantly decided to vote for it, because I'm more turned off by AHF's slush funding pet projects than I am by the proponents going after their opposition. Slightly.
My Vote: A reluctant Yes
Prop 35: Medi-Cal Funding
This headache-inducing measure would make permanent a healthcare tax that's now "temporary"—where have we heard that tune before?—assessed on HMOs such as Kaiser, and places restrictions on how the money should be spent.
This measure has the support of both the Republican and Democratic parties, and no opposition was filed to it. This is suspicious in general, but when we find that the Republicans are on the same side as Planned Parenthood, eyebrows go up.
Digging in there's nothing particularly objectionable, though it's more likely that my eyes are too glazed over to detect the fine points.
The opposition tends to be more general, objecting to locking in spending formulas rather than allow the legislature to adjust as conditions present themselves.
And it's this Ballot-Box Budgeting that I ultimately object to, putting it to the voters to make an all-or-nothing decision on a complex issue that really ought to be handled by our elected lawmakers.
My Vote: No
Prop 36: Crime Sentencing
This measure attempts to swing the crime-and-punishment pendulum back more to the "punishment" side, re-upping penalties for a host of lowish-level crimes that became misdemeanors due Prop 47's passage 2014 (plus other successful and unsuccessful measures since then).
At the time I supported Prop 47, as I don't believe in a throw-them-all-in-jail justice system, especially for low-level drug users, and though I certainly believe that shoplifting is a crime with actual victims, there have to be alternatives to locking them up.
That didn't turn out so well.
We've all seen the rampant shoplifting, where people just stroll out of a store right past the security guard with armloads of stuff that just happens to be less than the $950 total which would make it a felony.
We cannot fail to be outraged by smash-and-grab mobs demolishing the small shop owned by some little guy who can't get insurance any more because of the three previous mob visits.
And when even little stuff like toothpaste is behind lock and key, it's hard not to be demoralized about the state of the world.
I see much blame of this situation given to Prop 47, but this is not the whole story. There's been this very strange wave of leftist district attorneys (such as George Gascon in Los Angeles) who are simply declining to prosecute almost everything short of murder.
When the police know that the DA will not press charges against misdemeanor (or even felony) shoplifting, why arrest anybody and waste all that time and paperwork? Why even respond to the calls?
This obviously creates a (literally) free-for-all situation where one can steal without consequences, and this has to be brutally demoralizing for both store owners, police, and the decent people who pay more at the store due to all the losses.
Prop 36 tries to fix some of this, but there are a lot of moving parts.
Before reading about this I was for it, but gradually turned as I learned more, and then a trusted friend very much in the criminal justice community absolutely sealed a "No" answer for me.
The measure's title is "The Homelessness, Drug Addiction, and Theft Reduction Act", but we'll see that each of these falls by the wayside for one reason or another.
Let's dig in.
This is the main aspect that has outraged so many of the decent people: seeing brazen shoplifting or smash-and-grab mobs. We all pay more because of these dirtbags who give the middle finger to the rest of us.
But we don't need Prop 36 for this, as a large package of legislation was passed and signed by the Governor in August that addresses this squarely.
The provisions are interesting and very welcome (and I'm oversimplifying here, of course):
In prior law law, the $950 felony limit was not cumulative, so if I robbed five stores yesterday, stealing only $900 each time, there's no felony there.
These offenses can now be aggregated and prosecuted accordingly as felonies. This won't do much for the casual shoplifter, but will surely hit the retail gangs.
Previously, a police officer could not arrest somebody for a misdemeanor unless it was committed in their presence, which means that even if Walmart has the the entire theft on HD video, the cop can't arrest if he wasn't there.
With the new law, a cop can arrest for a misdemeanor as long as they have probable cause (I suspect the HD video would qualify).
There have been changes in jurisdiction that will allow county District Attorneys to prosecute cases out of their own county, which will make wide-ranging retail-theft gangs—who are distinct from casual retail shoplifters—more easy to prosecute even if they have covered several counties.
Some of these gangs intentionally spread out over multiple counties to fragment the prosecution, but this would put a stop to that.
There are other provisions, but these appear to be a real rarity in California politics: legislative changes to address a real issue and with no hidden agenda or gotchas. The cynical part of me still can't believe it.
Though I am ok with the retail theft provisions of Prop 36, they're no longer necessary as the laws have done a better job than this measure would.
Much crime is committed by those on (or seeking money for) drugs, and the shocking rise of fentanyl has lead to an epidemic of overdose deaths.
Something has to be done about this, but this measure's approach is mainly about throwing people in jail, with a head-fake towards the treatment option. It feels like what a tough-on-crime person would come up with, and I do not share that approach.
Drug treatment is notoriously expensive, difficult, and ineffective: there are people who have had tremendous success—and I know some of them—but it's a long and painful road that prison will not make much better.
Drug dealing is already against the law and people are prosecuted for it regularly.
I do support the Prop 36 provision that requires the admonishment to drug dealers: if you sell fentanyl to somebody and they die, it's a potential murder charge. But this is a minor provision.
This is a disingenuous part of the title, as the measure's only real nexus with homelessness is putting homeless drug users in jail.
Homelessness is a serious problem in California, and driving in some areas of Los Angeles or (especially) San Francisco can look like a war zone of tents and trash and strung-out people. There is no question this needs to be addressed.
And, sadly, the bulk of homeless people are not those down on their luck and need a place to sleep, but instead those who are hooked on drugs and have no way to rejoin decent society. A surprising number, when offered shelter and services, push back on the rules (such as "no drug use") so choose to stay on the street.
This is just a terrible, terrible problem, and Prop 36 won't even touch it.
---
So it came down to my feeling that Prop 36 is not necessary for the things that I did like, and is counterproductive on the things I'm not in agreement with, so this is a pretty easy "No" for me.
My Vote: No
Those discovering bad/missing links, typos, or even errors in judgment are encouraged to report them to me: steve at unixwiz.net
Last updated: Sun Oct 20 22:13:45 UTC 2024
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