Once again I present a handy guild to California ballot measures. We have 13 of these suckers to deal with, let’s get cracking.
1A through 1E: The bond measure. Lets put on some debt and build some stuff. All that stuff you need. Roads and Levees and Schools. People keep coming to California (it’s our celebrity trials and the complete absence of winter) and they are going to need all this stuff. The Chant recommends Yes.
83: More restrictions on sex offenders. Cause if theirs one thing I know, it’s that sex offenders get it easy. Please. Whenever a politico is feeling unpopular they kick sex offenders. Sex offenders are indefensible so no one ever says boo. And they keep having to come up with more and more restrictions and more and more penalties. Well, sooner or later we will have a ballot measure that mandates we torture to death everyone convicted of a crime with the word “sex” in it. The Chant recommends No.
84: More bonds. Yeah. Water. Water good. Get thirsty without it. Of course too much water means we drowned. But this measure deals with that problem too. There is no problem with the word “water” in it that this Proposition doesn’t fix. The Chant recommends Yes.
85: Parental notification for minors seeking abortions. California just voted this down last year. And yet they keep trying. The Chant recommends No.
86: Tax on cigarettes. Sure, why not? Tax those suckers right out of existence. The Chant recommends Yes.
87: Tax on California oil producers. This is the big one. It dings the oil companies to fund new alternative energy programs. If we are serious about global warming, this is how we deal with it. The Chant recommends Yes.
88: Parcel tax for kindergarten. Think of the children. The Chant recommends Yes.
89: Public finance of campaigns. You want big money out of politics? This is a start. The Chant recommends Yes.
90: Eminent Domain “reform.” This comes out of the Kelo decision, which allowed local jurisdictions to buy property for private economic use. I was pretty uncomfortable with Kelo and would be happy to support a limited restriction on eminent domain. But this law contains hidden measures to make any kind of government regulation a “taking” that property owners would have to be compensated for. Environmental regulations, zoning, just about everything local government does would suddenly become too expensive to do. I hate it when they play games with propositions. This one needs to go down hard. The Chant recommends No.
4 comments:
Okay, the only beef I have is with 87. You're all thinking, what is Erin going on about, she hates the environment?? No, but I hate foreign oil and our dependence on it. So we raise the tax on California oil, but foreign oil stays the same price. Where does it say that the refineries and gas companies have to buy the California oil? They won't. To keep their costs down, they'll buy more foreign oil. Of course the cost of gas will stay the same, because the amount of more expensive California oil used in gas production will drop. And how is this supposed to make us use less gas? The consumer isn't bearing the brunt, so the SUV's will continue to fly off the lot. That's a huge drain on the environment! Furthermore, the money is going to go to developing alternative energy programs. That's great, except that every time in the past alternative energy programs have been offered, they've failed miserably because they are aimed at the upper middle class, who don't worry so much about the cost of gas. Hybrid cars are to expensive and you can only put solar panels on your roof if you actually own your own house. Now if there was a plan as to exactly how they were going to use this tax money (ie low interest government loans for people to buy hybrids), I may consider it. But knowing that the money is not going to lead to a sudden surge of hybrid cars for low-income folks and lead to a greater dependence on foreign oil, I'm going to have to vote no. If a different measure came along to tax oil imports, I'd be all over that.
Okay okay okay, I'm probably really dumb, but has an independent organization ever launched a fake attack ad? Since people are more likely swayed by negative ads, running a fake one of your own in order to get more money to run a positive ad is possibly the stupidest thing I've ever heard. Also, if running a negative ad gave your competition money, I bet we'd see a lot fewer negative ads.
I can see that any measure that tries to keep political parties from collecting and spending massive amounts of money is of course not going to be supported by either party. That's a no-brainer.
But having read my little summary thing several times, I see no mention of money for ads. I'm going to have to look that up now... drat.
On the foreign oil dependence issue - the reason why we are dependent on oil is
1. we use a hell of a lot of oil
2. we don't have a lot of oil here
and
3. other places do.
What Prop 87 will do is spend money coming up with alternatives to oil. This a way of changing #1. 2 and 3 are not going to change regardless of tax rates.
Yes, we in California do not have a lot of oil, but we use a lot. I saw the Clinton commercial where he points out the Brazil has this great low oil useage. So lets just steal their technology and implement it. We don't really need to come up with alternatives, they are already there. What we need to do is to implement those alternatives. We need to make the technology affordable for it to spread through all levels of society. What I don't want to do is send all this money to research that isn't needed or giving incentives to the wealthier population who own their own houses and cars. More lower income people live farther away from their jobs, so drive more. They are the ones in need of relief because when gas prices sky rocket, they can't get to work.
I still haven't voted yet, but I need to soon (I'm absentee) and I still have to revisit all the websites and read up again on every measure. But I do like reading people's oppinions about the different measures, makes me think etc. So keep em coming!
Craig, you and your spelling rocks!
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