History has proven Socrates mostly right, which is why Utahns need to vote “yes” on Amendment B this election.

You have probably seen ads for or against Amendment B on the TV, your social media newsfeed, or in your mailbox. Amendment B would fix the status quo in Utah, one which has left the door open to wealthy causes buying our civic process. Right now, with our citizens initiative system, a tax increase only needs 50% plus one vote to become permanent law. That means an easily obtained, bare majority can add to everybody’s already huge tax burden.

If Amendment B passes, it would change this so that any initiative to raise taxes would need 60% of voters. When some group wants to raise revenue through a ballot measure, that group’s goal should be so convincing that they can get two-thirds of the state onboard. That’s the difference between genuine consensus and out-of-state money buying (yet) another election on narrow margin. This principle of needing a super-majority is not uncommon. To move a vote forward in the US Senate, you need 60 votes. For legislators to override an executive veto, they need 67% of both the Senate and the House.

Amendment B will make it harder to raise taxes, which is much easier now with such a low threshold.

We saw this a few years ago with Medicaid Expansion. Out-of-state, special interests funded a campaign to put it on Utah’s ballot in 2018, paying for the expansion with a sales tax increase. Since then, Utah taxpayers have spent over $5.3 billion on total Medicaid, with that expansion accounting for almost $495 million of its annual cost.

Utah already has one of the worst tax burdens in the country: 19th worst out of 50. Why this is the case is probably pretty complicated, but not wanting it to get worse isn’t. Amendment B will help keep us from crawling even higher.

The rhetoric against Amendment B has been pretty awful, insisting that it would take away citizens’ rights! and hand them over the special interests! Of course, that isn’t true: the people’s constitutional right to initiate legislation is in no way eliminated by Amendment B.

Indeed, the opposite is actually true, but for reasons that would make Socrates happy.

Here’s the problem with 21st Century democracy. Everyone agrees that money has too much influence in politics – everyone. But most people, certainly those we call “low-information voters,” end up voting for whichever side has the most money is the one that wins – every time. And whichever side has the most money is usually the one that needs to hand out the most favors on the other side of the election.

Without Amendment B, Utah could be headed down the same disastrous citizen initiative system hurting California. In the Golden State, citizens without the bandwidth to fully understand issues on ballot initiatives have been led into voting for unsustainable causes that even California can’t afford. If they can’t, we certainly can’t.

Life in Utah is already too expensive. In 2016, the federal government reported that Utah had the 6th best Housing Price Index (HPI) in America. But by 2023, we had dropped to 51st – the absolute worst.

Amendment B will not rob citizens of their power. It will make it harder for special interests to buy elections. Voters understand that well-heeled campaigns buying elections is part of modern-day democracy, but tend to forget that once they’re actually voting.

That wasn’t a problem in ancient democracy, but that didn’t mean things worked out too well for our friend, Socrates. The Athenians felt that his anti-democracy message was, ironically, bad for their democracy. They charged him in the courts with corrupting the city’s youth and 501 citizens found him guilty by a vote of 280 to 221. The penalty was death.

Vote “yes” on Amendment B.

Jared Whitley is a longtime DC politico, having worked in the US Senate, White House, and defense industry. He has an MBA from Hult international school in Dubai. This year, the Society of Professional Journalists named him among the best columnists in Utah.