The economic impact figures being tossed around in connection with Prop D have been, to put it charitably, misleading. The headline numbers — the ones designed to make you feel warm and fuzzy about yet another layer of city policy — don't survive even basic scrutiny. When you actually sit down and do the math, the projected benefits shrink considerably, and the costs that conveniently get left out of the conversation start to loom large.

This is a pattern San Franciscans should recognize by now. Propositions get sold on vibes and aspirational projections. The fiscal reality — the part where someone has to pay for it, and where the promised returns rarely materialize at scale — gets buried in footnotes that no one reads.

As one SF resident put it bluntly: "Please: do the math." It's a simple ask, and yet apparently too much for the political class pushing these measures.

Look, we're not saying every ballot proposition is a scam. Some deliver real value. But voters deserve honest accounting, not inflated projections designed to manufacture consent at the ballot box. When the economic impact numbers are presented without context — without accounting for implementation costs, bureaucratic overhead, and the opportunity cost of directing resources away from other priorities — you're not being informed. You're being marketed to.

San Francisco already has a spending problem. The city's budget has ballooned while basic services like street cleaning, public safety, and infrastructure maintenance continue to underwhelm. Every new proposition that adds fiscal obligations without honest cost projections makes that problem worse.

The next time someone throws a big economic impact number at you in support of a ballot measure, do yourself a favor: grab a calculator. The math matters more than the marketing.