Those California Propositions ...

My default position on the propositions on the California ballot is that there are too damn many of them.

We have a legislature. (And also armies of well-paid corporate lobbyists, and of unions caring for their members, and of citizen activist groups.) Though the Sacramento process is not a thing of beauty, usually the people who get paid to make the laws and the governor who gets paid to act as ringmaster to the governmental circus know more about policies than most voters. They should do the law making and we should throw the bums out if they make a (big) mess. But no -- we end up voting on policy conflicts large and small.

Some of the larger conflicts are important and citizens should weigh in. Others I'm offended to find in front of me for judgements I know I'm ill-equipped to make.

I think this year Prop. 15-YES; Prop. 16-YES; and Prop. 21-YES might make the state measurably better. Some of the others aren't terrible. Here goes:

Prop. 14 - bonds to fund stem cell research. California got in the stem cell research business in 2004 in order to stick a thumb in the eye of the George W. Bush administration which was trying to regulate such research out of business. His anti-abortion base thought stem cells were fetuses or something. Also, scientists and biotech companies saw a potential business opportunity funded by the state. Not much has come of it, but the stem cell research lobby wants more money. It's hard for me not to think this is a boondoggle -- but I could be wrong. No.

Prop. 15 - long overdue modification to California's sacred tax limitation measure. Prop. 13 has severely constrained property tax collections since 1979 -- a couple of generations -- to the detriment of public health, roads, and schools. Prop. 13 is great for homeowners who stay in their homes for decades, making their local tax bills predictable -- and small in relation to our wildly escalating property values. But when real estate turns over, it gets reassessed at something more like its contemporary value.

Prop. 15 has nothing to do with homeowners; it aims to capture some of the rise in value of commercial property -- property which is often held in complex legal structures that make it look as if it never changed ownership and so is never re-assessed. Prop. 15 would let governments tax rich real estate investors -- including Donald Trump's Bank of America building in San Francisco. It seems only fair to think they owe more than 1979 values. Yes.

Prop. 16 - Repeals Prop. 209 from 1996. That year a predominately white electorate looked around and saw California was changing and decided to get stingy about ensuring the state education system and state contracting were appropriately open to all Californians, less and less of whom looked like those voters. Prop. 16 undoes an attack on our emerging diversity which still hampers University admissions in welcoming new classes that look like all of us. Yes.

Prop. 17 - the California legal system sends offenders to prison when they are convicted of crimes, then releases them to supervised parole, then, eventually, releases them from further state supervision. That is, parole is a kind of purgatory between prison and freedom. We've decided that people convicted of felonies should get the right to vote back after serving their sentences. This measure means they get the right while still on parole, in the purgatory phase. Seems a no-brainer. The point is to enable offenders to come back into community. Yes.

Prop. 18 - allows 17 year olds to vote in primaries if they'll be 18 by the election for which the primary chooses the candidates. Great idea. Often the primary is the election that matters most. There's some evidence that the earlier young people are able to vote, the more likely they are to incorporate participatory citizenship in their picture of their adult selves. That's a good thing. Yes.

Prop. 19 - Oh please ... this one is a boondoggle for the real estate industry, as if they weren't doing well enough already with our inflated demand and property values. It promises old people they can keep their Prop. 13 tax exemption whenever they flip a house and move somewhere else in the state. Seems like outrageous theft by the old from the young to me. No.

Prop. 20 - the state has been moving away from locking people up and then holding them on parole. This wants to increase the use of parole. Seems like a step in the wrong direction. A lot of California's unbearable level of mass incarceration came out of voter over-reaction to fear of crime, which often means racial fear. We're on track toward doing better. Let's not go backward. No.

Prop. 21 - there has long been upward pressure on rents in California cities because more people want to live here than apartments and houses have been built for them. In the 1990s several cities enacted various rent control measures which prevented landlords from making excessive increases. Real estate interests speak loudly in Sacramento; they persuaded the state legislature to take back the authority from cities to enact most rent control rules, including in particular requiring that any such law allow "vacancy decontrol."  That is, whenever a renter moves, the previous rent level goes poof and the owner can start over with whatever rent the market will bear. This makes for a strong incentive to push renters out, especially long term ones who retain a low rent level. Prop. 21 would allow cities to set their own rental rules. Yes.

Prop. 22 - this is a classic misuse of the California initiative process. The legislature passed a law that made companies which thrived on the labor of "gig workers" who they treated as "independent contractors" without unemployment or health care reclassify many of these workers as employees. There are rules (not great ones, but some) about how companies can treat people they hire as employees. The business model used by Uber and Lyft doesn't profit them as much if their drivers have to be treated as employees. So they have invested in Prop. 22 to try to do away with the state labor regulation. They are pouring cash ($130M so far) into passing this prop they paid to put on the ballot; if they win, they won't have to pay out for the people who do the work. We can say shove it. No.

Prop. 23 - a classic example of matters we shouldn't be voting on. There's a lot of money in running kidney dialysis clinics. It's a profitable business; due to a quirk of health care legal jockeying, the feds support the needs of kidney patients relatively generously. According to the Bay Guardian this prop comes from a union trying to put pressure on the dialysis industry. Wasn't there some other way to resolve this rather than making the whole state vote on this? I remain ambivalent.

Prop. 24 - then there are propositions which are just plain deceptive. This claims to be a consumer privacy law; it's really just like those "terms of service" that tech companies make you click on to use their apps -- a way to engineer consent to their selling you. The ACLU and Color of Change agree: No.

Prop. 25 - the bail-bonds industry didn't like reforms that the legislature made to their industry of lending poor people money to get out of jail. So they paid to put the law up for a referendum vote. Because it is a referendum on an existing law, a No vote means you want to keep the state on a path to eliminate money bail. A Yes means you like the bail-bonds industry, would overturn the reforms, and give more money to police. That's not hard. No.

Whew! That's all 12 of these things for this year. I described this post to a friend as "irritated and opinionated." It is.