Month: October 2010

The description of Proposition 21 reads: "Establishes $18 annual vehicle license surcharge to help fund state parks and wildlife programs. Grants surcharged vehicles free admission to all state parks."

I'm still partially undecided on this, but I'm leaning towards "No".

I support funding the state parks and keeping them open for us to enjoy. However, I'm not convinced this is the best way of doing that. This proposition imposes an additional vehicle registration fee (the current fees are already pretty high, I think I had to pay over $240 this year for my registration). The new fee would be put into a fund which can only be spent on state parks and wildlife programs.

Of course, the state parks are currently funded from other tax sources. So this dedicated funding would allow the state government to pull the original funding and use it for other things. This part is okay in idea. We have budget problems and this would help offset the deficit. However, it creates an inflexible chunk of the budget. Which would mean that next time the budget needs to shrink you couldn't cut any funding from the parks/wildlife programs. Which, of course, is the goal of people who care about those programs and nothing else. This is a problem, in my opinion, when it means that other programs get cut which are more important than parks/wildlife. When you keep the parks open at the expense of homeless shelters I think your priorities are off base.

An issue I've heard raised is that it spreads the cost out over the entire population including the people who won't ever go to the parks anyway (due to lack of interest, distance, time, etc.). This does seem like a noble argument, but is inherently meaningless. The parks are a public good and subject to the tragedy of the commons. If they don't get funded by the overall population then they have to raise entrance fees. If they try to subsist entirely on entrance fees then only the wealthy will be able to afford to use the parks and the purpose of the parks is defeated. State and national parks will always need to be financed from tax dollars in order to provide them to the public at large. So I don't consider this perceived unfairness to be a valid argument against the fee.

My main issue is that it creates that inflexible distribution of tax dollars. Why not propose an $18 vehicle registration surcharge to simply "help offset the budget deficit"? I believe the reason why that wasn't done is because no one would vote for it since it just looks like a tax increase (which it is as is this wording). Since it's just a tax increase, which is occasionally necessary, I think it should be treated as such. As it is, it's a tax increase that can't be used flexibly.

Propositions 20 & 27 both address redistricting. 20 moves the congressional redistricting responsibility from the legislature to the Citizens Redistricting Commission (created in 2008 by prop 11 for state districts, as opposed to federal districts). 27 would instead repeal prop 11 and move redistricting responsibility back to the legislature entirely.

The CRC is made up of 14 registered voters who apply for a position on the commission. It convenes once every 10 years after each census to perform redistricting.

Only one of 20 and 27 will be implemented. If both pass, the one receiving more "yes" votes will be implemented.

To me it appears the CRC is designed to reduce the effect of gerrymandering by the elected officials. If the representatives aren't involved in redistricting anymore then they can't conveniently modify their district to make it easier to stay elected. The CRC has a strict set of criteria that must be followed when creating districts which are not required under current law when the legislature controls redistricting.

I'll probably be voting in favor of 20 and against 27.

The CRC is supposed to try and maintain (as much as possible) neighborhoods and "communities of interest" which has been defined as "a contiguous population which shares common social and economic interests that should be included within a single district for purposes of its effective and fair representation." The Pro-27 argument tries to say (without saying) that prop 20 is racist because of this clause. That by keeping a socio-economic population together in a district they'll be disenfranchised (but they don't really explain how). I'm not buying this argument since when kept as a district they're basically guaranteed representation. The alternative allows such a population to be split apart into neighboring districts where they might end up being the minority in each of those districts. In which case they will definitely be disenfranchised.

I think of political districts like a machine learning clustering algorithm. You don't want your clusters to have large chunks of unrelated data, especially when otherwise cohesive data gets split across several other clusters. That cohesive data should represent its own cluster. I think political districts should be treated similarly. Otherwise you get a definitely skewed representation rather than a possibly skewed representation.

In fact, there's really no reason I can think of that redistricting couldn't be performed by a fairly simple machine learning algorithm. It wouldn't really be very difficult to feed in your parameters (the set of rules which the CRC must follow) and let the computer spit out your new districts. The code used could be published and anyone could potentially review the process and determine if there was any intentional bias introduced into the system.

I've decided that writing short blog posts about the various propositions on this year's ballot would be helpful in getting me to organize my thoughts and form an opinion on each topic.

This post's topic is Proposition 19: The Regulate, Control and Tax Cannabis Act of 2010.

I've read the text of the law, the summary statement provided by the Attorney General, as well as the paid arguments for and against the proposition (all as provided by the official voter information guide). This is probably going to surprise some people, but I'm probably going to vote to pass this proposition. I'm not in favor of using marijuana, but I am in favor of treating it in a more rational manner than our country has been. From my understanding, medically speaking, marijuana is apparently safer than alcohol and tobacco, yet those substances are legal while users of marijuana face prison sentences (not that X is legal and Y isn't as bad as X is necessarily a valid argument, but it holds a point).

The text of the law puts in place pretty much all of the same restrictions currently in place on alcohol and tobacco. I'm a huge fan of the public smoking ban and proposition 19 contains a similar restriction on marijuana use (can't be used in public or in the presence of minors). I certainly wouldn't be in favor of it without the many restrictions the law contains.

I think the legalization would provide an overall societal benefit in terms of reducing the number of incarcerated persons, increasing much needed tax revenue, and reducing cash flow to drug cartels. I think proposition 19 appears to be a fair compromise from the pro-legalization crowd while addressing the potential issues outright legalization might cause.

I'm open to hearing your opinions and taking those reasoned positions into consideration.