The checkout line at a big chain drugstore moved slowly, as usual. I held a few items, and so did the people around me. Then someone walked past us with an armful of merchandise and straight out the door without paying. The clerk kept scanning.
The first time, I could hardly believe it. Eventually, I noticed something more troubling. It happened so often that nobody reacted anymore. Not the clerks. Not the customers.
Standing there, I did the math. Someone pays for what walks out that door. First the store, then its employees, and eventually the rest of us through higher prices. When losses become unsustainable, stores close. The chain where I witnessed this has since gone bankrupt.
But what troubled me most was how ordinary it had become.
How did something so plainly wrong come to feel so normal? Part of the answer lies in a ballot measure—and the words used to sell it.
Three ways words shaped the choice
In November 2014, California voters approved Proposition 47, 59.6 percent to 40.4 percent.1 Its text gave it a name: “the Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act.”2 Who votes against safe neighborhoods or schools?
The state’s official ballot label was blunter: “Criminal Sentences. Misdemeanor Penalties.” Inside, the measure described the offenses it covered as “nonserious, nonviolent crime” and then defined shoplifting for property valued at $950 or less.
The Legislative Analyst’s Office spelled out the result in the voter guide. Shoplifting of $950 or less “would always be a misdemeanor and could not be charged as burglary.”3 Proposition 47 did not legalize theft. It changed what theft was called and what it cost the person who committed it.
What happened after the vote
By 2023, reported retail theft in California was about 11 percent higher than in 2014, after a 32 percent jump in just two years.4 That September, Target closed stores in Oakland and San Francisco, among others, citing theft and organized retail crime.5
In Riverside and San Bernardino counties, the State Auditor found that the share of people convicted four or more times rose 12 percentage points, and theft convictions in that group rose 14. The agencies it reviewed blamed the reduced sentences.6
In 2024, voters approved Proposition 36, 68.4 percent to 31.6 percent, to allow felony charges again for certain repeat theft.7
The theft was real. The words made it smaller—long enough for the habit to set in.
Make the promise bigger
The name did the first piece of work. Safe Neighborhoods and Schools made the promise bigger than the text.
The name made a promise: to set aside a quarter of the savings for K–12 school programs. The name specified where the savings would go and omitted what happened to the person who walked out the door.
On October 25, 2001, the U.S. Senate passed a bill 98 to 1, with the full title written so its initials would spell USA PATRIOT.8 9 Only Russ Feingold voted no, effectively voting against “uniting and strengthening America.”
In 2022, Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act. The Penn Wharton Budget Model’s preliminary estimate of the Senate bill found that “the impact on inflation is statistically indistinguishable from zero, thereby indicating low confidence that the legislation will have any impact on inflation.”10
One law passed under George W. Bush; the other under Joe Biden. Both arrived wrapped in a name few people wanted to vote against.
Make the consequences sound smaller
The text did the opposite: it made the harm seem minor. It promised to “require misdemeanors instead of felonies for nonserious, nonviolent crimes like petty theft.” Each of those words is a verdict, delivered before you’ve considered the facts.
Once you see it, you’ll find it everywhere. Retailers call stolen merchandise shrink. Companies call layoffs rightsizing. Governments call tax increases revenue enhancement. Each word takes something painful and makes it small enough to slip past your objection.
Put it to work: look beyond the label
Next time a ballot measure, bill, or company policy asks for your support, take three minutes:
Compare the name, the label, and the text. Where they part ways, trust the text. Proposition 47’s label was closer to the truth than its name. California’s official voter guide prints all three; many states publish one, too. Read past the summary to the full text.
Circle the words that shrink or swell. Nonserious and rightsizing shrink. Safe, comprehensive, and common-sense swell. Ask who reached that verdict, and on what evidence.
Ask who gains. It’s the question from last week’s article: who gains if you understand this, and who gains if you don’t?
The words deserve a closer look
The clerk who stopped reacting wasn’t the problem. Neither were the customers who looked away. What troubled me was that something so clearly wrong had become ordinary. Somewhere along the way, theft became shrink—a word that names the loss while concealing its cause.
That is what language can do. A reassuring name can make a proposal easier to accept. A softer label can make its consequences harder to recognize. And a changed definition can alter what the law permits without changing what people believe is right.
But words can also bring things back into focus. Read beyond the title. Find out what the law actually changes. Ask who benefits, who bears the cost, and whether the promise aligns with the text.
Before they change the law, they change the language. That is where scrutiny must begin.
The words are theirs to choose. The decision is yours to make.
This week: Two more ways language can shape what we believe, without a misleading name or a redefinition.
The question goes beyond one California law. Explore more on language, persuasion, and truth at Line of Ascent.