Billi, I'm actually really happy you went through the propositions, woot! I definitely don't find myself in alignment with a number of your conclusions, but that's totally fine, all I'm hoping for is people informing themselves on what they're being asked to vote on and then voting on it.
The only things I'd point out are:
Prop 15: This is essentially a rollback of Prop 13 for businesses properties. Since Prop 13, property taxes in CA have been tied to the purchase price of a property, not the current market value, and changing it at all has long been considered the third-rail of California politics. It's great in some ways - my parents have their three bedroom, two bathroom house paid off and pay $800 a year in property taxes, while we pay over $10,000 a year for our 3bd,1 1/2ba condo. It's great that my parents won't find themselves suddenly priced out of their home. On the other hand, it also means there's a missing downward pressure on home values, which I believe is part of the reason why housing prices are so ludicrous here. It's also part of the reason why so many of our other taxes in this state are as high as they are - property taxes are generally a pretty significant amount of tax revenue and people like my parents are paying almost nothing into it. At any rate, Prop 15 would change that back to using the market value to set property taxes but only for larger business properties, small businesses, buildings that are over some percentage residential (I'd have to look up the percentage), and residential properties would be unaffected. I'm personally for it, but given that it's maybe the most significant change to property taxation since the late 70's, I figured I'd fill in some more detail.
Prop 18: I can't speak to the typical 17 year old, but since primaries are essentially the parties choosing who they want to vote for in the general rather than actually electing anyone, I'm totally for it. Imagine if you were 17, but turning 18 before the general, and you had to watch as you couldn't cast your vote for Bernie and he lost out to Hillary or Joe?
Prop 21: I actually need to study it further too. I like it, but knowing that the AIDS Healthcare Foundation are supporting it makes me immediately suspicious.
Prop 24: CCPA is a *huge* pain for tech companies right now. GDPR is already difficult enough (the work I was doing on when I was let go was around adding obfuscating abstractions around email addresses which was going to require a complete overhaul of the entire site to accomplish), and CCPA is worse. That said, I also agree with the goals of CCPA. I don't really know what the right answer is on this one, but I wanted to both throw out that loosening privacy rules isn't that great and that the tech companies pushing for this might not be entirely nefarious, it's been a pretty massive burden to try to adhere to it. As it stands now, some apps/sites you really like would literally not be able to exist if they were to become compliant with CCPA.
Prop 25: I'm so happy you're a yes on this. I am too. Your financial status shouldn't determine how the legal system treats you.
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Originally Posted by Crazed_Insanity
I'm really okay either way. I don't really believe a typical 17 soon to be 18 teen will really be that eager to participate in the primaries... might as well just keep it simple. You may vote when you're actually 18. So no for me on this one.
