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It takes 144 pages of fine print to explain this year's California ballot propositions.

Is this a joke?

It's getting hard to tell the unsolicited Yellow Pages book that landed on my doorstep apart from the secretary of state's voter guide that came in the mailbox.

I stayed up half the night reading that guide; I haven't gone through that much coffee since cramming for science finals in college. All I could think was: Why?

OK, let's break this down to specifics. There are too many propositions (as usual). They are too complicated (as usual). And there are too many people out there who apparently haven't gotten the memo about our state's financial crisis.

Starting with points one and two, will somebody please remind me why we elect people to go to Sacramento and represent us? Is it not because they're supposed to understand the complexities of running this great state and see to it that decisions are made about things like funding prisons, rehabilitation, law enforcement, transportation and the like?

In the last presidential election year, 2004, roughly 11 million Californians voted on most of the ballot measures. Even if turnout is exactly the same this year, that's 11 million people who will need to understand the workings of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation well enough to determine whether it should have a whole different structure for rehabilitating drug users. And that's just one out of 12.

It took me about four hours to read through the voter guide, not counting the actual text of the legislation. If all 11 million Californians spend just that much time, that's 44 million hours (and no, I'm not naive enough to think that's how it actually happens).

But hang with me here. Just to do an absolute bare minimum job of examining the facts that arrive in the mailbox, Californians will have to spend 21,153 working years, collectively, studying this stuff.

At the state's minimum wage of $8 an hour, that's $352 million worth of time.

And I'm not counting the hours we're subjected to misleading propaganda ads.

Then again, most people won't spend that much time. In fact, many won't take the trouble to flip a coin. Yet they'll be voting on measures that require fine-tuned knowledge of state government and a grasp of facts such as the engineering feasibility of a high-speed rail track or the scientific research on drug-addict rehabilitation, or the macroeconomics of egg production and interstate trade, not to mention food safety science.

One hundred and forty-four pages.

Then there's the cost. Most of the propositions entail new spending. Yet most of the authors either have been living under Mt. Shasta with the Lemurians for the past few years or are straight-up lying to you. We're going to spend millions, in some cases billions, of new dollars, they say. But don't worry! We won't raise taxes.

They say this to the residents of a state whose leaders just passed a budget that can only be balanced by the assumption of nonexistent revenues that, theoretically, will be generated by enticing its cash-strapped Californians to do the responsible thing: Buy more lottery tickets.

Oh, and the governor just told the federal government we may need a $7 billion loan in the face of short-term cash shortages.

Here's my personal bottom line as a voter: You get your finances - our finances - figured out first. Then we'll talk about authorizing another penny of additional spending. I don't care how admirable the cause.

In the meantime, most of us are a little too busy figuring out our own uncertain financial situation to spend so much time worrying about the wish lists of special interests. Makes you think it ought to be harder to get these things on the ballot.

It really does.

Editor Silas Lyons may be reached at 225-8210 or slyons@redding.com.