Let’s look at the awful California ballot initiatives this year.
Proposition 15: Making businesses pay the market rate for their property tax, like – Everyone else? – will drive out Mom and pop businesses all over California. Mom and pop! Oh no! Poor Mom and Pop! Poor corner market!
Proposition 19: Making big rich landlords maybe pay the market rate for property tax, like – I dunno? Everyone else in the country? – will massively increase taxes on poor homeowners like Mom and Pop, forcing them to sell their homes and go homeless! Poor Mom and pop! They’ll have to move! But only if they have three houses already!…But that means they’ll have to sell one and move into the other two. But that will mean poor Mom and Pop will only have two houses to live in except for three! How will they survive? They’ll probably have to eat cat food or go homeless!
Proposition 21: Voting for putting some sane controls on the insane rents bankrupting Californians actually meant voting to increase your rent. It will drive rents sky high! You don’t want that, do you? Besides your poor landlord will have to sell one of his yachts! Oh noes!
I know the landlord-criminals always rent control makes rents go up, but how does that even work anyway. Rent control literally sets limits on your rents. I’ve met people who lived in rent controlled apartments in San Francisco and their rent was much lower than their non-rent controlled neighbors.
Ok, so rent control makes your rent go up! So, instead, let’s...not have any rent control! Then rents will totally go down and stay affordable and stuff! Whoops, I was wrong. They went sky-high because there were no limits on them.
So…no matter what you do, your rent’s going to go sky-high while your landlord gets to add new rooms to his mini-mansion! We can’t win! No matter what we do, we’re fucked! Time to pour another drink.
Proposition 22: Voting for giving Uber drivers some rights meant an all-out war on poor Uber drivers, forcing most of them out of their jobs! Help save the Uber drivers! Vote yes! Thank you Uber and Lyft!
Proposition 23: Voting to put a regulation or two on the dialysis industry meant an all out war on those poor suffering dialysis patients! Poor patients! They’re all gonna die! Oh noes!
Proposition 24:Voting for increased privacy on the Net actually meant voting for less privacy. Sponsored by Facebook and Twitter, the best friends of consumers who are totally out to protect your privacy!
My brother’s a hardline partisan Democrat, and I think he even voted rightwing on a couple of those crappy initiatives.
Every time I get fancy mail telling me to vote some way on a proposition, especially to be please vote liberal and progressive on this measure, I’m immediately suspicious. I figure it’s some Big Money scam tricking me into voting for their greedy BS, and I’m almost always right. That’s why I need those voter guides. Without those I’d be dead. But who reads one? It’s pretty hard for me with a genius IQ to figure out those evil initiatives written by (((crooked, lying, cheating, thieving lawyers))).
The initiative process has been completely upended. It was initiated ~1910 in this state to put measures on the ballot to control out of control scumbag robber baron corporations like Southern Pacific Railroad, which seemed like they owned half the state.
The initiative process was supposed to be a way for the ordinary working person to have a voice against the rich and the corporate tycoons because like Hell was he ever going to get a voice in the Big Money-controlled state government. It was supposed to be a progressive, grassroots citizens’ voice thing. Now half the propositions were put in there by huge corporations, usually totally deceptive propositions where they tell you to vote “liberal” except if you vote liberal, you actually vote for the rightwing big money initiative!
I was originally fooled by most of these BS initiatives. Most are written to be as dishonest as possible and the No campaigns are always very dishonest. You can always tell which ones not to vote for because those are the Big Money campaigns flooding your mailbox with slick campaigns telling you to vote for some groovy liberal and progressive things which is always neither. The good campaigns actually but out of the Left never have any money of course, so you hardly ever get brochures from them.
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