Prop 43: No
“Two-Thirds Vote Requirement for Local Special Tax Initiatives and Property Tax Initiative Prohibition Amendment”
Cities and counties can only raise taxes via ballot measure. It's why your ballot is long, it's a major impediment to cities and counties obtaining the funding they need to provide basic services, and it’s why we can’t have nice things. It’s also why, every two years, you're bombarded with ads by well-funded right-wing ideological ghouls trying to convince you that the people you elected are Bad and Incompetent and Don't Deserve Your Money.
If we were talking about money the federal government collects for, you know, vaporizing children abroad, then we could talk about the morality of taxation with a bit more Thoreau-subweeting-Emerson-from-jail energy. Or even if people objected to money wasted on depthless overtime fraud by a handful of cops or something. But when the Government is Wasting Your Money!!!1!111 people get started, they’re usually talking about stuff you use and like, like roads and schools and swimming pools and arts programs and trash collection and Lake Merritt not being a dead-fish slurry. And if you agree that we need taxes for these things, then maybe the best way of deciding what and how much taxes we need isn't voting on it every two years? Of course we do it, because we have to. But when doing so—when voters decide whether to tax themselves—it should be as simple and direct and easy as possible, and also democratic. Fundamentally, we shouldn't have to vote on it at all (that's why we elect people!), but if we are voting, then majorities should rule, and it should be based on the merits of the tax itself.
Oakland Review of Books
Prop 43 is bad because it will make it harder for people to raise taxes on themselves, across the board, an attempt to use democracy to infringe on democratic self-governance.
Right now, if a tax measure is introduced by voters and makes it onto the ballot by a citizen’s signature campaign, the tax measure needs only 50 percent plus one vote to pass. However, if it gets on the ballot by way of the local government putting it on the ballot, it needs a supermajority to pass, or two-thirds of voters. If you squint, you can kinda see the logic here (or what it would be if it wasn’t just emanations of anti-government Jarvis particles). The idea is that if a measure comes from the voters, then it is not from the Evil Government (because if you are like the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, you think Government is Evil).
But that’s dumb, both because the whole requirement that we vote on taxes is dumb, but also because 34 percent of the population shouldn’t be able to outvote the other 66 percent. Proposition 43 would change the rules so that they could, such that even voter-proposed and signature-placed tax measures would require 66.7 percent of voters to vote yes to become law, making taxes harder to raise across the board. Ironically, the proposition needs only a 50-percent-plus-one-vote majority to raise the threshold for cities and counties forever, since this one goes in the California constitution. This is also dumb.
Don’t make it harder to raise taxes, please. Vote no.
Find more of our voting guide here.