The December 2026 issue of Reason explores Argentine President Javier Milei’s accomplishments and what is yet to be done.

Argentina was approaching monetary detonation. Its Treasury could not finance its deficits voluntarily, its central bank was effectively insolvent, and monthly inflation was accelerating above 12 percent.

That was just three years ago. Today, monthly inflation has fallen below 2 percent, sovereign spreads touched eight-year lows in July, and the central bank’s gross reserves reached their highest level since 2019 in September. This is one of the most remarkable disinflations of the modern era to have occurred without dollarization, a currency board, or a new currency. Javier Milei did not merely slow the rate at which prices were rising; he dismantled the fiscal and monetary mechanism that was driving Argentina toward hyperinflation.

But as the events of late 2025 showed, that achievement remains vulnerable. A stabilization can be economically coherent and still be politically mortal. Argentina has restored a substantial degree of public sector solvency, but it has not yet made that solvency independent of the next election.

Deficits Without Creditors

Deficits themselves do not make Argentina unique. What distinguished Argentina was how those deficits had to be financed. In a country with functioning capital markets and a credible government, the state sells bonds to domestic and foreign savers; it obtains command over present resources, while creditors receive claims on future tax revenues. Public borrowing may be undesirable or objectionable on other grounds, but so long as the government remains solvent in the long run, it is a financial operation that can be sustained over time without debt restructurings or bouts of high inflation.

Argentina had largely exhausted that option. After repeated inflationary crises and serial debt repudiations—nine sovereign defaults, most recently in 2020—investors would lend to the Treasury only at prohibitive rates. Borrowing at those rates would itself make the debt trajectory unsustainable, so creditors expected either another restructuring of dollar-denominated bonds or an inflationary liquidation of peso-denominated liabilities. Those expectations raised borrowing costs further, making the anticipated outcome more likely. The Argentine state had trapped itself in a doom loop.

So the government relied on the one creditor that couldn’t refuse it: the central bank. Fiscal deficits were financed, directly or indirectly, by issuing pesos. But that brought it up against a second constraint. The inflationary effect of money creation depends not only on the quantity of money supplied but on the quantity people are willing to hold. And after decades of monetary abuse, Argentines wanted as few pesos as possible.

Every newly issued peso became a hot potato to be exchanged for goods, dollars, or inflation-protected assets. As the demand for real peso balances contracted, the government had to print ever larger quantities to extract the same real resources, which pushed prices up faster, which further reduced the willingness to hold pesos, which required still more issuance. That’s the feedback loop of an economy approaching hyperinflation.

Rather than stop the process, the government tried to repress its visible symptoms—a task for which the country has a well-worn tool kit. Its most familiar instrument is the cepo cambiario, a web of capital and exchange controls with which the state prevents its citizens from freely satisfying their demand for dollars and hides the peso’s depreciation behind an artificially strong official exchange rate. President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner imposed it in 2011; Mauricio Macri lifted it on taking the presidency, only to reinstate it amid the currency run of 2019; the leaders who followed tightened it further. Under the cepo, exchange rates multiplied. Exporters were forced to surrender their dollars below market value, while politically privileged importers bought them cheaply from the central bank. That arrangement punished exports, subsidized favored imports, invited corruption, and bled reserves.

The second instrument operated through the central bank’s own balance sheet: extremely high nominal interest rates paid on short-term liabilities held mainly by commercial banks. These so-called remunerated liabilities were a standing bribe to the financial system to sit on its pesos rather than convert them into dollars or goods. Since those interest payments were themselves financed by creating new money for which there was no demand, they generated what Argentines call the quasi-fiscal deficit—a deficit produced not by the Treasury’s spending programs but by the central bank’s mounting interest bill. Paying interest to suppress monetary expansion today merely promised greater monetary expansion tomorrow.

By the end of 2023, the numbers had become grotesque. The Treasury’s fiscal deficit stood at roughly 5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), while the central bank’s quasi-fiscal deficit approached 10 percent. Sovereign spreads hovered near 2,500 basis points—meaning that when an equivalent U.S. Treasury bond yielded 5 percent a year, Argentina would have had to pay around 30 percent to borrow in dollars. Monthly inflation hit 12.8 percent in November and was accelerating. (For perspective: Americans were furious when inflation peaked at 9 percent a year under President Joe Biden.) The gap between the official exchange rate and parallel rates exceeded 100 percent and at times approached 200 percent, strangling foreign trade. And the central bank’s net international reserves stood at roughly negative $11 billion, the lowest level in its recorded history.

That was the machine Milei inherited on December 10, 2023: an insolvent Treasury, a central bank buried under remunerated liabilities, a rapidly contracting demand for the national currency, and a regulatory apparatus built to disguise the consequences of all three.

Argentina was not yet in hyperinflation. But it had entered its antechamber.

Solvency First, Liberalization Second

Milei’s strategy was to restore the solvency of the Treasury and the central bank so that the controls concealing their insolvency could safely be removed. The sequencing was important. If he had scrapped every exchange control while the government still ran large deficits, the central bank still printed pesos to cover them, and net reserves were deeply negative, that could have accelerated rather than stopped a speculative run.

The first front was fiscal. Milei cut government spending, and not just in inflation-adjusted terms. Some cuts were explicit: Public works were halted, discretionary transfers to provincial governments were slashed, subsidies were pared back, and government employment contracted. (Such changes struck at many of the mechanisms through which Argentina’s political class distributed patronage.) Other cuts operated through inflation itself: The government declined to fully index some nominal expenditures to rising prices, shrinking the real value of public salaries and pensions. This was socially painful, particularly for pensioners, but it allowed the fiscal correction to proceed faster than Congress would otherwise have permitted.

National primary spending fell by roughly a quarter in real terms in Milei’s first year—an adjustment with few peacetime precedents—which brought national spending, as a share of the economy, back toward levels last seen in 2007–08. Within weeks of taking office, the government was posting monthly primary surpluses; it closed 2024 with a fiscal surplus and has treated balanced budgets as the nonnegotiable anchor ever since. That change altered the monetary regime before any formal institutional reform. Once the Treasury stopped requiring net financing from the central bank, the primary source of fiscally driven peso creation disappeared.

Milei also devalued the official exchange rate within days of taking office, bringing it closer to the market rate. That produced an immediate price shock, with monthly inflation exceeding 25 percent in December 2023. Critics called the devaluation inflationary, and in an immediate accounting sense, it was. But much of the inflation it unleashed was already latent, repressed behind an official exchange rate that almost nobody could access and nobody believed. By recognizing the accumulated depreciation at once, the government sharply narrowed the gap between official and parallel markets, restored exporters’ incentives, and began dismantling expectations of an uncontrolled adjustment. After a transitional period, most exchange restrictions were lifted in April 2025.

Skeptics will note—correctly—that the liberalization co-incided with a new $20 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and will be tempted to conclude that it was this that made it possible to lift the cepo: just another bailout in a long history of Argentine bailouts. That reading misses the difference between financing a flow (the deficit) and refinancing a stock (the inherited debt).

Earlier IMF programs had poured external resources into governments that were still generating new fiscal imbalances, so the money flowed in while the pile of public liabilities kept growing—most spectacularly in 2018, when the largest loan in the IMF’s history stabilized nothing. This time, the Treasury was already in surplus, and the facility operated on the stock inherited from the past: Argentina’s largest external creditor was rolling over its own exposure, thickening the central bank’s liquidity buffers, and stretching the horizon over which the old debt would be serviced. That support undoubtedly reinforced the program’s healing dynamics and probably brought the lifting of the cepo forward. But it was neither a sufficient condition for success nor, over the medium term, a necessary one. A Treasury running surpluses and a central bank no longer bleeding pesos would eventually have rebuilt reserves and regained market access on their own, though this would have happened more slowly.

Defusing the Central Bank

The second front was the central bank itself. Once the Treasury stopped demanding monetary financing, the Banco Central de la República Argentina (BCRA) could sharply cut the interest rates paid on its remunerated liabilities. With lower expectations of inflation and depreciation, it was no longer necessary to pay enormous nominal rates to keep pesos from stampeding into goods and dollars.

The relationship ran in both directions. Falling inflation allowed lower nominal rates, lower rates shrank the central bank’s interest bill, a smaller interest bill reduced future money creation, and reduced expected money creation further increased the demand for pesos. A virtuous circle began to replace the old doom loop.

The government then dismantled the central bank’s stock of remunerated liabilities, shifting the job of absorbing excess pesos—and its cost—onto Treasury instruments. This did not make the debt disappear, but it lengthened maturities and placed the cost where it belonged: on the Treasury’s accounts, under public and legislative scrutiny, rather than hidden within the central bank’s balance sheet. The distinction matters. The quasi-fiscal deficit had allowed governments to claim more fiscal discipline than actually existed by parking part of the cost of stabilization outside the formal budget. Milei’s consolidation made the state’s liabilities transparent and stopped the central bank from autonomously compounding them through an escalating interest bill.

As confidence returned, sovereign spreads collapsed from roughly 2,500 basis points when Milei was elected to around 400 in July 2026, their lowest in eight years. That allowed the Treasury to roll over maturing debt at ever longer terms and lower cost. Argentina has not yet fully regained ordinary access to international capital markets; the government still leans on multilateral financing and domestic issuance to meet foreign-currency maturities, and spreads widened again, to above 600 by late September, as long-term U.S. rates rose and investors began to price the 2027 presidential election. But the probability of another restructuring has receded dramatically. The improvement shows on the central bank’s balance sheet too: In 2026 alone, the BCRA has bought more than $14 billion in the foreign exchange market, and in early September gross reserves topped $50 billion, their highest level since 2019. Purchases have slowed sharply since the summer, and usable net reserves remain far smaller, but the direction of travel has reversed from the deeply negative position inherited in 2023.

All of this occurred alongside a modest but real reduction in taxes. The Impuesto PAIS, a major surcharge on foreign-currency transactions, was allowed to expire at the end of 2024. Export taxes were abolished for regional economies and thousands of industrial products and were cut for major agricultural exports on a declining schedule; tariffs, internal taxes on selected goods, and the wealth tax were also reduced, pushing the national tax burden to its lowest share of GDP in almost two decades. These cuts were modest relative to Milei’s ambitions, but notable because they occurred without sacrificing the surplus. Milei did not balance the budget by raising taxes; he cut spending faster than revenue fell.

The macroeconomic result is hard to dispute. Monthly inflation, 25.5 percent in December 2023, was 1.7 percent in August 2026. Year-over-year inflation has fallen to 33.5 percent from 211 percent in 2023, and it is still declining.

The Political Run of 2025

Does all of this mean that Argentina is financially saved and that Milei has completed his task? No. The months before the October 2025 midterms show why.

When the opposition began climbing in the polls, and above all after it crushed the government’s candidates in September’s Buenos Aires provincial election, markets started pricing a scenario in which Milei lost the political capacity to defend his own agenda. The repricing was brutal. Country risk, which had been trading around 700 basis points in mid-August, doubled to nearly 1,500 by mid-September, and the peso depreciated by more than 20 percent over the episode, even though short-term interest rates soared and the authorities burned billions of scarce dollars trying to stabilize it.

Note what had not happened. The government had not abandoned the surplus, had not returned to monetary financing, and had not rebuilt the remunerated-liability machine. Milei’s program had not secretly become insolvent; what triggered the crisis was the rising probability that its enemies might regain the power to make the state insolvent again. Nor was the panic irrational. Asset values depend on expected future policy, not just current policy. Savers who believe a future government will monetize deficits, impose controls, or restructure debt will sell pesos and Argentine bonds before that government takes office, and that means the anticipation of a regime reversal can generate, in advance, the very crisis the reversal would eventually have produced.

And this was not merely a panic among foreign fund managers. Ordinary Argentines know their political class too well and have learned to protect themselves by dollarizing; the threat of a fiscally irresponsible government had them fleeing the peso en masse. The central bank’s statistics tell the story. Gross retail purchases of dollars reached some $5 billion in September and almost as much in October—double their previous monthly pace, and the heaviest retail dollarization since the eve of the election in 2019—before collapsing to barely a third of that rhythm the month after the vote.

The panic revealed a real weak point, though. Milei had fixed the flows but not yet the stocks: The state’s liquid assets—its international reserves—still fell short of the bills coming due, whether pesos being dumped for dollars or hard-currency bonds maturing in the months ahead. Rebuilding a state’s balance sheet takes years. Reserves accumulate purchase by purchase, and maturities lengthen only as fast as creditors’ trust returns. Until that slow work is done, any rise in the perceived risk of a political reversal can abruptly close the state’s access to refinancing, leaving it with maturing debts it cannot yet cover and a run on the peso it cannot stabilize with its own resources.

That was the gap the U.S. Treasury stepped in to fill. In October 2025, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent set up a $20 billion swap line with Argentina’s central bank and—in an operation American taxpayers had every reason to question—bought pesos outright in the days before the vote. Bessent was bridging, for a few weeks, a gap that political panic had blown open. The intervention contained the panic just long enough for the election to remove its immediate political cause. On October 26, Milei’s coalition took more than 40 percent of the vote, expanded its bloc in Congress, and locked in enough votes to sustain the president’s vetoes. Within days, the peso steadied, spreads resumed their slide, and the central bank was buying dollars again. By year’s end, Argentina had repaid the $2.5 billion it had actually drawn on the swap.

Still, the lesson is uncomfortable. A stabilization is consolidated only when an election can no longer plausibly revive expectations of default and monetary collapse. Argentina isn’t there yet.

Time, if politics allows, will close the balance sheet gap. Reserves are being rebuilt, and maturities stretch a little further with every successful auction. But some of Milei’s central libertarian promises are still, for now, only promises.

Temporary or Permanent Change?

Milei inherited a country with no voluntary creditors, almost no demand for its currency, a Treasury hooked on monetary financing, a central bank trapped by its own interest bill, deeply negative net reserves, and capital controls that strangled trade while failing to stop depreciation. In less than three years, his government produced sustained fiscal surpluses, dismantled the quasi-fiscal time bomb, cut monthly inflation from 25 percent to below 2 percent, compressed sovereign spreads to eight-year lows, liberalized the exchange market, rebuilt reserves, and reduced taxes. And it did that without confiscating deposits, without a new default, and without raising the overall tax burden.

Hyperinflation is no natural disaster. It is the political consequence of a state that loses solvency and finances itself through a currency its citizens no longer wish to hold. Milei has stopped that process. Whether he has changed Argentina’s institutions enough to prevent its return is a verdict that will arrive only after he leaves office.

The post How Milei Defused Argentina's Hyperinflation Bomb appeared first on Reason Magazine.

NOTE: The following post is largely adapted from last year’s November 7 post on the same subject.

Since 2007, I have advocated designating May 1 as an international Victims of Communism Day. The May 1 date was not my original idea. But I have probably devoted more time and effort to it than any other commentator. In my view, May 1 is the best possible date for this purpose because it is the day that communists themselves used to celebrate their ideology, and because it is associated with communism as a global phenomenon, not with any particular communist regime. However, I have also long recognized that it might make sense to adapt another date for Victims of Communism Day, if it turns out that some other date can attract a broader consensus behind it. The best should not be the enemy of the good.

As detailed in my May 1 post from 2019, November 7 is probably the best such alternative, and over time it has begun to attract considerable support. Unlike May 1, this choice is unlikely to be contested by trade unionists and other devotees of the pre-Communist May 1 holiday. While I remain unpersuaded by their objections on substantive grounds, pragmatic considerations suggest that an alternative date is worth considering, if it can  thereby attract broader support.

The November 7 option is not without its own downsides. From an American standpoint, one obvious one is that it will often fall close to election day. On such occasions, a November 7 Victims of Communism Day might not attract as much attention as it deserves, because many will – understandably – be focused on electoral politics instead. Nonetheless, November 7 remains the best available alternative to May 1; or at least the best I am aware of.

For that reason, I am once again  doing a Victims of Communism Day post on November 7, in addition to the one I do on May 1. If November 7 attracts more support, I may eventually switch to that date exclusively. But, for now, I reserve the options of returning to an exclusive focus on May 1, doing annual posts on both days, or switching to some third option should a good one arise.

In addition to its growing popularity, November 7 is a worthy alternative because it is the anniversary of the day that the very first communist regime was established in Russia. All subsequent communist regimes were at least in large part inspired by it, and based many of their institutions and policies on the Soviet model.

The Soviet Union did not have the highest death toll of any communist regime. That dubious distinction belongs to the People’s Republic of China. North Korea probably surpassed the USSR in the sheer extent of totalitarian control over everyday life. Pol Pot’s Cambodia may have surpassed it in terms of the degree of sadistic cruelty and torture practiced by the regime, though this is admittedly very difficult to measure. But all of these tyrannies – and more – were at least to a large extent variations on the Soviet original.

Having explained why November 7 is worthy of consideration as an alternative date, it only remains to remind readers of the more general case for having a Victims of Communism Day. The following is adopted from this year’s May 1 Victims of Communism Day post, and some of its predecessors:

The Black Book of Communism estimates the total at 80 to 100 million dead, greater than that caused by all other twentieth century tyrannies combined. We appropriately have a Holocaust Memorial Day. It is equally appropriate to commemorate the victims of the twentieth century’s other great totalitarian tyranny.

Our comparative neglect of communist crimes has serious costs. Victims of Communism Day can serve the dual purpose of appropriately commemorating the millions of victims, and diminishing the likelihood that such atrocities will recur. Just as Holocaust Memorial Day and other similar events promote awareness of the dangers of racism, anti-Semitism, and radical nationalism, so Victims of Communism Day can increase awareness of the dangers of left-wing forms of totalitarianism, and government domination of the economy and civil society.

While communism is most closely associated with Russia, where the first communist regime was established, it had comparably horrendous effects in other nations around the world. The highest death toll for a communist regime was not in Russia, but in China. Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward was likely the biggest episode of mass murder in the entire history of the world.

November 7, 2017 was the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia, which led to the establishment of the first-ever communist regime. On that day, I put up a post outlining some of the lessons to be learned from a century of experience with communism.  The post explains why the lion’s share of the horrors perpetrated by communist regimes were inherent flaws  of the system. For the most part, they cannot be ascribed to circumstantial factors, such as flawed individual leaders, peculiarities of Russian and Chinese culture, or the absence of democracy. Some of these other factors, especially the last, probably did make the situation worse than it might have been otherwise. But, for reasons I explained in the same post, some form of dictatorship is  virtually inevitable in a socialist economic system where the government controls all or nearly all of the economy.

While the influence of communist ideology has declined since its mid-twentieth century peak, it is far from dead. Largely unreformed communist regimes remain in power in Cuba and North Korea. In Venezuela, the Marxist government’s policies have resulted in political repression, the starvation of children, and a massive refugee crisis – the biggest in the history of the Western hemisphere. The removal of President Nicolas Maduro has so far done little to change the nature of that regime.

In Russia, the authoritarian regime of former KGB Colonel Vladimir Putin has embarked on a wholesale whitewashing of communism’s historical record. Putin’s brutal and indefensible invasion of Ukraine owes more to Russian nationalist ideology than communism. But it is nonetheless fed in part by his desire to recapture the supposed power and glory of the Soviet Union, and his long-held belief that the collapse of the USSR was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” It is also telling that most communists in Russia and elsewhere have joined with nationalists in backing Putin’s line on the war.

In China, the Communist Party remains in power (albeit after having abandoned many of its previous socialist economic policies), and has recently become less tolerant of criticism of the mass murders of the Mao era (part of a more general turn towards greater repression).

China’s horrific repression of the Uighur minority is reminiscent of similar policies under Mao and Stalin, though it has not – so far – reached the level of actual mass murder. But imprisoning over 1 million people in horrific concentration camps is more than bad enough.

Far-left support for Hamas since the horrific October 7, 2023 terrorist attack is yet another reminder of the inherently evil nature of communist ideology. Backing terrorism is part of a long history of support for repression and mass murder. Not all extreme socialists of the type who support Hamas are communists. But the latter are a subset of the former.

In the West, the popularity of “democratic socialism” in some quarters is a sign that many have failed to learn the lessons of the communist experience. Democratic socialism has many of the same flaws as its authoritarian counterpart, and – as the Venezuelan case shows –  is unlikely to stay democratic for long, if implemented. Ironically, in their support for sweeping government control of the economy, democratic socialists have much in common with MAGA nationalists.

Victims of Communism Day is also a good time to remember our duty to help those victims. Among other things, it is unjust to deport migrants fleeing oppressive Marxist dictatorships, like those Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela, as the Trump Administration seeks to do to hundreds of thousands who entered the US legally under the CNVH program. This year, Trump ramped up efforts to deport Cubans back to their communist oppressors.If some on the left tend to ignore the evils of socialism, many on the nationalist right have been exacerbating the plight of its victims.

In sum, we need Victims of Communism Day because we have never given sufficient recognition to the victims of the modern world’s most murderous ideology or come close to fully appreciating the lessons of this awful era in world history. In addition, that ideology, and variants thereof, still have a substantial number of adherents in many parts of the world, and still retains considerable intellectual respectability even among many who do not actually endorse it. Just as Holocaust Memorial Day serves as a bulwark against the reemergence of fascism, so this day of observance can help guard against the only ideology with an even greater number of victims.

The post November 7 as Victims of Communism Day – 2026 appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Official results have yet to be called, but California’s Proposition 45, which would have dramatically scaled back environmental review requirements for everything from new energy infrastructure to new highways, is looking set for defeat.

With an estimated 65 percent of the vote counted, Proposition 45 is trailing with 45.1 percent of votes in favor and 54.9 percent of votes opposed.

That’s a massive and growing gulf that the measure does not seem likely to overcome.

Should Proposition 45 go down, it will be a major setback for the movement to make California a state that builds.

The target of the measure’s reforms is the California Environmental Quality Act, which requires government agencies to study the environmental impacts of public projects they undertake directly as well as private projects they have some discretionary control over.

In practice, that means everything from a new publicly sponsored highway to a privately built suburban subdivision must be studied for its effects on noise, air quality, traffic, archaeological resources, and more.

Additionally, the law empowers third parties to challenge agency approvals of projects in court by asserting that this or that environmental impact was not studied thoroughly enough.

These features have made CEQA notorious for slowing down development in the Golden State. The most stringent levels of CEQA review can take years. For some major projects, the environmental study phase can stretch out for decades.

The law has also become project opponents’ weapon of choice for slowing down disfavored projects. Everyone from labor unions to rival developers has also used the threat of CEQA litigation to extract concessions from project sponsors.

These problems haven’t gone unrecognized in California. Former Gov. Jerry Brown called CEQA reform “the Lord’s work.” Current Gov. Gavin Newsom has criticized the law for stopping development (although he declined to endorse Proposition 45).

In fits and starts, the Legislature has exempted whole categories of projects (most significantly, urban infill housing) from CEQA reform.

Proposition 45 was an ambitious effort initiated by the state’s Chamber of Commerce to reform core elements of the law for a much broader array of projects.

It would have created an opt-in streamlined CEQA process for “essential” projects, including everything from energy and water infrastructure to highways to suburban housing and more.

This streamlined process would be governed by binding shot clocks. The most stringent forms of CEQA review would have to be completed within a year, for instance. Rather than consider an indeterminate number of environmental impacts, this streamlined process would only require project sponsors to confirm that their project complied with objective, quantifiable existing regulations.

The initiative would also have narrowed the grounds on which project opponents could sue under CEQA. CEQA lawsuits would also have to be decided on an expedited schedule.

Proponents of Proposition 45 pitched their proposition as less radical than the long list of CEQA exceptions that had been passed by the Legislature. The initiative didn’t guarantee any project would get approved. It didn’t allow any projects to fully skip CEQA review.

Nevertheless, there was no getting around the fact that the streamlined opt-in process was far different, and far less rigorous, than what CEQA requires today.

It thus attracted widespread opposition from environmental groups, unions, and Jane Fonda. It also split pro-housing groups who’ve long supported reforming CEQA to make urban housing and transportation development easier.

Some of these groups opposed the measure because it would enable more single-family greenfield development. Some of the state’s biggest YIMBY (“yes in my backyard”) organizations declined to either endorse or oppose it.

Putting ambitious CEQA reform on the ballot was an untested proposition. As the votes come in, Proposition 45 is increasingly looking like a failed proposition.

There are a few takeaways from the initiative’s probable failure. The first is that there really doesn’t seem to be a coherent “abundance” movement. Not all groups that want more apartments want more single-family homes. Many of the people who are frustrated when CEQA stops new bike lanes are still happy to see the law block a highway.

When “build more of everything more quickly” was on the ballot, selective supporters of new development sided with the anti-growth forces. And that’s enough for a majority to take down Proposition 45.

The second takeaway is that, in California at least, the voters don’t see broad-based permitting reform as a cure for widespread anger at rising costs of living.

Poll after poll showed that the midterm electorate was primarily motivated by high and rising prices and government corruption. Despite Proposition 45’s proponents’ best efforts to sell their permitting reform as an affordability measure, a majority of voters didn’t buy it.

That all suggests some hard political limits on the political viability of a broad “abundance agenda,” even if it is the correct policy.

On CEQA specifically, reform advocates will likely have to go back to their old tactics of pushing for specific exemptions and more modest reforms within the state Legislature.

The post A Major Reform of California's Environmental Regulations Looks Destined for Failure appeared first on Reason Magazine.

President Donald Trump today announced that Stephen Miller will replace Susie Wiles as White House chief of staff. That change does not bode well for anyone who hoped that Trump, chastened by his party’s disastrous performance in the midterm elections, would moderate the policies that alienated voters.

Miller, previously a deputy chief of staff, is the main architect of Trump’s immigration crackdown, which has targeted many peaceful and productive U.S. residents, contrary to the promise that it would focus on “the worst of the worst.” Although Trump has intermittently expressed qualms about the impact of immigration enforcement on businesses and their longtime employees, Miller has made it clear that he favors an indiscriminate approach.

A January 2026 profile of Miller in The Atlantic described an exchange that epitomizes his attitude toward immigration. “Stephen, if you had it your way, everyone would look exactly like you,” Trump reportedly told Miller, who was arguing about immigration policy with another White House aide. “That’s correct,” Miller replied.

Since illegal immigration is an “invasion,” Miller told reporters in May 2025, the Trump administration was “actively looking” at suspending the writ of habeas corpus to facilitate its mass deportation campaign. “A lot of it depends on whether the courts do the right thing or not,” he said. It turned out that Miller was not just spitballing: The New York Times later reported that his comment reflected a serious internal debate about whether to unilaterally override the ancient principle that people nabbed by the government have a right to challenge their detention in court.

Miller’s support for aggressive immigration enforcement extends to violence against Americans who object to it. After immigration agents fatally shot Minneapolis protester Alex Pretti in January, Miller defied the video evidence by condemning him as “a domestic terrorist” and “would-be assassin” who “tried to murder federal law enforcement.”

Last April, Miller described birthright citizenship as “the gravest and most preposterous of all constitutional abominations.” Two months later, after the Supreme Court rejected Trump’s attempt to rewrite the 14th Amendment, Miller called it “one of the most destructive and outrageous decisions” in the Court’s history.

Miller also was appalled by judicial pushback against Trump’s “emergency” tariffs. After the U.S. Court of International Trade rejected them in May 2025, he implied that it had no legitimate role in determining whether the president had the authority he claimed. “The judicial coup is out of control,” he wrote on X. Last February, when the Supreme Court agreed that Trump’s tariffs were illegal, Miller condemned the decision as “cowardly” and “horrendous,” saying the justices were “torturing” the law and the Constitution.

Miller’s hostility toward judicial review mirrors Trump’s attitude. Also like Trump, Miller has no compunctions about punishing people for constitutionally protected speech.

In November 2023, after Media Matters for America reported that X was “placing ads for Apple, Bravo, IBM, Oracle, and Xfinity next to pro-Nazi content,” Miller urged “conservative state Attorneys General” to investigate the organization for “fraud.” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey took Miller’s advice, launching investigations that were ultimately blocked by federal courts on First Amendment grounds.

After conservative activist Charlie Kirk was assassinated in September 2025, Miller blamed a “vast domestic terror movement,” including “messaging designed to trigger [and] incite violence”—i.e., harsh political rhetoric. “In Charlie’s name,” he said, “we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security, and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle, and destroy these networks.”

Miller, in short, is apt to be the opposite of a calming influence on Trump. His elevation seems likely to reinforce the president’s worst instincts.

The post As Chief of Staff, Stephen Miller Will Reinforce Trump's Worst Instincts appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Hello and welcome to another edition of Free Agent!

We’ve got a special bonus edition of the newsletter for you today, covering the results of all kinds of sports-related ballot initiatives and politicians running for office.

This is not an entirely exhaustive list—do not come at me for excluding Abdul El-Sayed (who played club lacrosse in college) or an NFL punter who I don’t remember that ran for state legislature. Vote totals may change slightly from what we have here as final vote counts come in.

We’ll start with ballot initiatives, since they have a more direct impact on sports policies.

Stadium taxes: In Plano, Texas, voters rejected several tax increases that would have helped fund a new development, including an arena for the Dallas Stars. The tax increases included a 2 percent tax on hotel rooms, a 5 percent tax on car rentals, an event parking tax of $3 per car, and up to a 10 percent tax on tickets. Athletes themselves would have been taxed too, paying a $5,000 “facility-use tax” for each game played at the new arena.

Over in Inglewood, California, the vote on an expanded ticket tax for SoFi Stadium, Intuit Dome, and Kia Forum is extremely tight—50.76 percent of voters have sided with no tax increases, but votes are still being counted. Also, in McKinney, Texas, the school district asked to issue a $2.5 million bond to upgrade its 12,000-capacity football stadium. Voters rejected the idea, with almost 70 percent against.

Transgender athletes: Nebraska passed a ballot initiative, with 68 percent in favor, requiring public schools, and private schools competing against public schools, to designate their sports teams by biological sex (coed included as an option). It also bans males from participating in female sports. A similar measure in Colorado seems likely to pass, but has just 52.7 percent support with an estimated 88 percent of votes counted. Arizona already has a law like this for K-12 public schools, but Proposition 318—which passed with 59 percent of the vote—extends it to private schools, colleges, and athletic association facilities (like Little League). In Washington State, Measure 638 has similar prohibitions, and it passed with 57 percent of the vote. The new law will require female athletes to submit sex verification documents from their doctor or healthcare provider.

Online sports betting: Two ballot initiatives sought to legalize online sports betting in Nebraska, but they both failed with about 55 percent of the vote against. Nebraska has legal sports betting, but only at in-person, physical sportsbook locations.

Sporting goods tax: Colorado voted on Proposition 137, to divert a portion of the sales tax on sporting goods to be spent on environmental conservation. With 87 percent of votes counted, the measure is leading narrowly with 50.8 percent support.

Sales tax for stadium trains: A portion of Colorado cities voted to collectively approve Proposition 7A, which will create a 0.333 percent sales tax in those cities to be spent on a passenger rail system that will have stations at, among other places, Colorado’s major sports stadiums.

Of course, federal legislation wasn’t on the ballot, but with Democrats taking over so much of the government in January, you have to think they’ll have no interest in backing the carefully negotiated Protect College Sports Act in its current form. They can just wait until January and try to get a better deal (though they would still need President Donald Trump’s signature then, unless they can get some GOP help to overcome his veto).

“If you want a quote, here it is,” the aide said, “the NIL bill is dead on f****** arrival.”

It’s time for college sports to move on from the PCSA. https://t.co/bQrf5FEcM2

— Mit Winter (@WinterSportsLaw) November 5, 2026

Now for the politician-athletes who ran for office:

Senate

Minnesota Senate: Former NFL sideline reporter Michele Tafoya, running as a Republican, lost her race with 44 percent of the vote.

Iowa Senate: Josh Turek, a wheelchair-bound Paralympian, won two gold medals with the U.S. men’s national wheelchair basketball team. On Election Day, he won again as a Democrat, with 51 percent of the vote.

Nebraska Senate: Incumbent Sen. Pete Ricketts, a Republican, won with 50 percent of the vote. The Ricketts family—led by Pete’s father—are owners of the Chicago Cubs.

New Jersey Senate: Incumbent Sen. Cory Booker, a Democrat, is now much more well-known as a senator than he was as a Stanford tight end, but just to cover our bases, he won reelection with 62 percent of the vote.

Governor

Alabama Governor: Sen. Tommy Tuberville, a Republican, decided to run for governor instead of the Senate again, and he won with 52 percent of the vote. Tuberville was a well-known college football head coach for two decades combined at Ole Miss, Auburn, Texas Tech, and Cincinnati.

Massachusetts Governor: Incumbent Gov. Maura Healey, a Democrat, won reelection with 62 percent of the vote. Healey was co-captain of Harvard’s basketball team and spent two years playing professional basketball in Europe in the 1990s.

Nebraska Governor: Incumbent Gov. Jim Pillen, a Republican, won reelection with 51 percent of the vote. He was a defensive back at Nebraska under Tom Osborne and was inducted into the school’s Football Hall of Fame long before his political career.

Vermont Governor: Incumbent Gov. Phil Scott, a Republican who won lower-level stock car racing championships and competed as recently as 2022, won reelection with 53 percent of the vote.

House of Representatives

Ohio’s 4th Congressional District: Incumbent Rep. Jim Jordan, a Republican, won reelection with 64 percent of the vote. He announced on Wednesday that he’ll run to be minority leader for Republicans in the new Congress. Jordan won two national championships for wrestling in the 1980s, though he became an assistant coach and was accused of enabling sexual misconduct (Jordan denies this).

Minnesota’s 6th Congressional District: Incumbent Rep. Tom Emmer, currently the House Majority Whip for Republicans, won reelection with 56 percent of the vote. Emmer, who grew up in the hockey hotbed of Minnesota, played college hockey at both Boston College and the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Arizona’s 1st Congressional District: Former NFL kicker Jay Feely, running as a Republican, lost with 45 percent of the vote. Coincidentally, he lost to Amish Shah, who was team physician for the New York Jets when Feely was on the team.

Kansas’ 3rd Congressional District: Incumbent Rep. Sharice Davids, a Democrat who had a brief professional MMA career, won reelection with 60 percent of the vote.

Massachusetts’ 3rd Congressional District: Incumbent Rep. Lori Trahan, a Democrat, won reelection with 67 percent of the vote. She played volleyball at Georgetown and is in her high school’s Athletic Hall of Fame.

Minnesota’s 8th Congressional District: Incumbent Rep. Pete Stauber, a Republican, won reelection with 53 percent of the vote. Stauber played on the Lake Superior State(!) national championship hockey team in 1988. He went on to play minor league hockey but never made the NHL.

Texas’ 4th Congressional District: Incumbent Rep. Pat Fallon, a Republican who won a national championship under Lou Holtz on Notre Dame’s 1988 national championship team, won with 56 percent of the vote.

Texas’ 21st Congressional District: MLB legend Mark Teixeira, running as a Republican, won this district north of San Antonio with 55 percent of the vote. (Automatic home run in the Congressional Baseball Game every year?)

Texas’ 33rd Congressional District: Colin Allred, who went undrafted but played 32 games for the Tennessee Titans, won this Dallas-area district with a whopping 79 percent of the vote. He’s a Democrat.

Now for some people who you may remember running but didn’t get past their primaries:

• Former college football coach Derek Dooley and former NBA first-round pick Royce White (both Republicans) were at one point running for Senate (in Georgia and Minnesota, respectively), but they were eliminated in primaries earlier this year. 
• The father of Cubs third baseman Alex Bregman ran for governor of New Mexico but lost in the Democratic primary.
• Tiffany Glenn Burress, the wife of NFL legend Plaxico Burress (apparently the 46th greatest New York Giant of all time!), ran for Congress as a Republican in New Jersey but lost in the primary.

The post How Athlete Politicians and Sports Ballot Measures Fared on a Wild Election Day appeared first on Reason Magazine.

An organized effort to circumvent the Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010) is gaining traction nationwide. It’s also drawn a legal challenge in Montana.

On Tuesday, Montana voters passed I-194. This citizen-initiated ballot measure amends the state statute to prohibit “artificial persons” from spending “money or anything of value to support or oppose the outcome of a vote of the electorate.” Artificial persons can be nonprofits, trusts, partnerships, corporations, trade associations, unions, and unincorporated associations. The prohibition extends to any entity doing business in Montana. 

The initiative’s text copies much of a similar law Hawaii passed in August, which stripped corporations operating in the state of their “power to spend money or contribute anything of value to influence elections or ballot measures.” Under Montana’s I-194, the “absence of political spending power” is now a condition for any entity seeking “state-conferred legal status and charter privileges.” The statute would force every corporation looking to support or oppose a cause in Montana to funnel its money through a political committee.

The Frontier Institute, the Frontier Action Fund, the Montana Family Foundation, and the Montana Republican State Central Committee are now challenging the statute in court. “This law attempts to accomplish indirectly what the Constitution expressly forbids: silencing organizations that engage in political advocacy,” said Owen Yeates, senior attorney at the Institute for Free Speech, the nonprofit that filed the lawsuit on behalf of those organizations. 

The Institute for Free Speech—which is also leading the challenge against Hawaii’s law—filed the lawsuit Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Montana. It seeks to block the state from enforcing I-194. It asks the district court to declare the statute “unconstitutionally void and unenforceable, as it violates the First Amendment rights of speech, association, petition, assembly, and the press.”

The lawsuit argues that I-194 “denies the individuals constituting these groups—especially those not in the majority or not already exercising public instruments of power—the ability to pool their resources, and thus the ability to influence policy.” The lawsuit quotes directly from the Supreme Court’s opinion in Citizens United, alleging that I-194 “diminishes” Montanans’ right to “inquire, to hear, to speak, and to use information to reach consensus,” which the Court recognized as a “precondition to enlightened self-government and a necessary means to protect it.”

Indeed, Montana’s statute appears to run afoul of the Court’s ruling in Citizens United, which states that “no sufficient governmental interest justifies limits on the political speech of nonprofit or for-profit corporations.” However, the initiative’s authors claim they aren’t trying to “overturn or eliminate or violate” Citizens United; they only want to make it “irrelevant.” 

The Transparent Election Initiative (TEI), a nonprofit founded in 2025, led the ballot measure effort in Montana. The organization is the brainchild of Tom Moore, a senior fellow at the progressive think tank Center for American Progress who helped draft Hawaii’s law, and Jeff Mangan, the former Montana commissioner of political practices. 

With the statute’s passage, Montana joins Hawaii as one of only two states to successfully enact a law redefining corporations as entities without the power to spend money or contribute anything of value in politics. That might not be the case for long.

Legislatures in at least 15 other states, including California, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania, are considering or have considered similar bills to strip corporations of their ability to spend money on politics. TEI’s central argument is that “wealthy special interests wield outsized influence” on the nation’s politics, leaving “ordinary Americans” outside the political process. Yet the group’s most prominent supporters are a cadre of political elites, including two former Montana governors, a former Montana senator, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.), and former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. 

TEI also received the single largest donation on either side of the campaign: a $722,300 cash contribution from Samantha Walton, wife of billionaire Walmart heir Lukas Walton. The organization may not believe in the current system, but it’s certainly willing to exploit it. 

On its website, TEI concedes that “organized political campaigning” is a requirement to “qualify for and succeed at the ballot box.” Still, it’s working in earnest to prevent other organizations from exercising the same constitutional rights. Barring an injunction, the law will take effect on January 1, 2027.

The post Lawsuit Challenges Montana's New Ban on Corporate, Union, and Nonprofit Spending on Elections appeared first on Reason Magazine.

For a drug that has been essentially dead in the United States for four decades, the Quaalude has maintained an impressive cultural presence.

Quaaludes were a staple of the leisure suit/disco era. Anyone who lived through the 1970s probably remembers them. Anyone who didn’t may remember Leonardo DiCaprio’s extraordinary performance in The Wolf of Wall Street: After swallowing several 15-year-old, supposedly ineffective Quaaludes, his character discovers that the pills aren’t quite as ineffective as he thought. Unable to walk, he crawls to the top of a flight of stairs at a country club, curls himself into a ball, and tumbles down them in an attempt to reach his Lamborghini.

The scene is hilarious. The pharmacology behind it isn’t.

Quaalude was the trade name for methaqualone, a sedative-hypnotic that became one of America’s favorite recreational drugs before virtually disappearing from the U.S. market in the 1980s. Now reports suggest it may be making a comeback—though this seems, for the moment at least, to be a niche phenomenon rather than widespread use.

A Safer Sleeping Pill—What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

First synthesized in India in 1951, methaqualone belongs to a class of drugs called quinazolinones. It entered the American pharmaceutical market in the 1960s as a non-barbiturate treatment for insomnia. Physicians at the time were seeking alternatives to barbiturates, which were effective but notoriously dangerous in overdose.

Methaqualone worked well as a sleeping pill. It also produced euphoria, relaxation, disinhibition, and other effects that made it immensely popular for recreational use. By the 1970s, Quaaludes, particularly the famous 300 mg tablets stamped 714, had become fixtures of American drug culture.

Methaqualone works much like other sedatives, including barbiturates and benzodiazepines, by enhancing the effects of gamma-aminobutyric acid, a neurotransmitter that suppresses activity in the brain. The result is a combination of relaxation and sedation—and at higher doses, impaired judgment and loss of muscular coordination. Combined with alcohol, things get worse fast: Respiratory depression, coma, and death can result.

The supposedly safer alternative to barbiturates had developed a rather barbiturate-like résumé.

Congress Stumbles In

Concerns about misuse, dependence, diversion, and overdoses prompted federal regulators to place methaqualone in Schedule II of the Controlled Substances Act in 1973. Physicians could still prescribe it, but under tighter restrictions.

By the early 1980s, state lawmakers were increasingly targeting methaqualone. Nine states had enacted bans on its sale, and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) slashed the manufacturer’s production quota from 58 million tablets in 1978 to just 7.5 million in 1983. Facing shrinking sales, hostile legislation, and adverse publicity, Lemmon, the drug’s last American manufacturer, announced in November 1983 that it would stop producing Quaaludes.

But Congress wasn’t satisfied. In 1984, lawmakers passed legislation ordering methaqualone moved to Schedule I, the category reserved for drugs deemed to have “no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.” Congress bypassed the Controlled Substances Act’s normal scheduling procedures and ordered the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to withdraw its approval.

FDA officials, you see, had acknowledged that methaqualone had legitimate medical uses and posed no unique risks compared with other marketed sedative-hypnotics. Even DEA officials questioned the need for legislation. Nevertheless, politicians, many lacking medical or pharmacological expertise, decided they knew better. With the stroke of a pen, Congress effectively declared that an FDA-approved medicine had no accepted medical use. In a 1987 decision concerning the DEA’s scheduling of MDMA (a.k.a. “ecstasy” or “molly”), a federal appeals court highlighted the contradiction: Congress had placed methaqualone in Schedule I despite its recognized therapeutic value and FDA approval. The court noted that the DEA itself could not have taken that action under the ordinary scheduling rules.

Methaqualone’s risks, benefits, and pharmacological properties hadn’t changed. Congress had simply changed its legal status.

The Return of the ‘Lude?

Although methaqualone virtually disappeared from the American market, it remained a recreational drug in South Africa, where it was commonly sold under the name Mandrax.

Reports of renewed interest in methaqualone are now accompanied by another development: the emergence of methaqualone analogs, chemical cousins that may differ in potency and toxicity. The pattern resembles what we’re seeing today with fentanyl analogs. A 2026 review reported that some methaqualone derivatives were roughly 100 times as potent as the original drug, while researchers still know little about their risk in human beings.

In April 2026, the Center for Forensic Science Research and Education reported detecting 2-methoxyqualone, a structural analog of methaqualone, in illicit drug material collected in Pennsylvania and California.

Small changes to a drug’s chemical structure can profoundly alter its pharmacological properties. In the case of 2-methoxyqualone, essentially nothing is known about its effects, potency, or toxicity in humans, as is the case with many illicit fentanyl analogs. From a synthetic chemistry standpoint, producing a virtually unlimited variety of methaqualone analogs is trivial, requiring relatively simple chemistry and readily available starting materials.

A 2026 scientific review identified five newer methaqualone analogs reportedly 100 times more potent than the original drug, although those potency estimates remain preliminary. Meanwhile, Australian drug-checking researchers identified a pill submitted as a Quaalude that actually contained methylmethaqualone. An earlier American clinical case report documented a patient who believed he had ingested methaqualone but had actually taken another analog, SL-164.

The Iron Law of Prohibition

This emerging market offers another example of what drug policy analysts call the iron law of prohibition. As enforcement raises the risks and costs of supplying prohibited drugs, illicit suppliers have incentives to favor more potent substances that are easier to conceal and transport. Prohibition also encourages underground chemists to develop more potent chemical substitutes or to adulterate existing drugs with other substances to intensify their effects, exposing consumers to products of uncertain composition, potency, or toxicity.

The appearance of methaqualone analogs is consistent with that pattern. Although it is too early to establish that prohibition caused their development or that they are widely used, it’s a pretty sure bet.

What we do know is that Congress removed a medically useful drug from the regulated pharmaceutical market, even though its own committee acknowledged methaqualone’s accepted medical use. Lawmakers simply decided that the risks of diversion outweighed its therapeutic benefits.

Four decades later, people trying black-market Quaaludes will encounter products of uncertain composition, potency, and purity, lacking the quality controls that accompanied pharmaceutical manufacturing.

Whether Quaaludes will ever regain their former popularity is anyone’s guess. Congress banned a drug in the name of protecting the public, and the market that may now be emerging offers consumers chemicals about which scientists know considerably less.

Apparently, that counts as progress in the war on drugs.

The post Quaaludes Might Be Back. The Iron Law of Prohibition Never Left. appeared first on Reason Magazine.

There is an oft-repeated political cliché that says tariffs are bad economics but good politics—the logic being: They might be costly, but they allow politicians to look like they are prioritizing domestic jobs and workers over foreign trade.

That line turned out to be only half right.

Voters turned decisively against President Donald Trump and Republicans in Tuesday’s elections, delivering a historic beatdown that was the most lopsided midterm result since the post-Watergate wipeout of 1974. The results are so overwhelming that it’s probably not accurate to blame any singular issue for the GOP’s meltdown. It was a little bit of everything: the corruption, the war, the thuggish immigration enforcement, ongoing inflation, general exhaustion with Trump, and so on.

Vice President J.D. Vance and others in the Republican Party are reportedly trying to pin the blame for this result entirely on the war. “The reason we lost is the war,” Vance told The New York Times on Wednesday—conveniently pinning all the blame on the one major Trump administration decision that he’s questioned.

But the tariffs are a major part of the story.

Tariffs are Trump’s signature economic policy. More than that, in fact. They have become the signature economic policy for the entire populist movement that has sprung up around Trump. The president promised a “golden age,” and allies like Oren Cass and Peter Navarro promised a realignment that would bring working-class voters into the GOP for good.

So how do Americans view this tentpole policy of the populist right?

According to an NBC News exit poll of midterm voters, just 21 percent said the tariffs had helped the national economy. Even fewer voters, just 14 percent, said the tariffs had helped their local economies. Meanwhile, more than 60 percent said the tariffs had caused harm.

The short version: It turns out that tariffs are bad economics and bad politics.

That’s not news to Reason readers (or probably to most people outside the White House). For years, we’ve documented how Trump’s tariffs have raised prices, harmed businesses, disrupted supply chains, and more. One study found that the tariffs were as painful to American manufacturing as an additional 8.7 percent corporate tax would have been.

It’s also worth remembering that the tariffs have failed to achieve their primary policy aim as well: America’s trade deficit last month hit the highest level since March 2025.

Tariffs made everything more expensive and didn’t provide much in return. Trump has talked for years about how the tariffs would generate tons of money for the government—as if that’s a good thing. Those claims were wildly exaggerated, even before the Supreme Court forced the Trump administration to refund a significant amount of the tariffs because they had been unlawfully imposed.

Politically, the tariffs have been a drag on Trump’s approval rating since the moment he stood on the White House lawn to declare “Liberation Day.” The trends that led to a Democratic landslide on Tuesday night began in April 2025, when Trump very publicly promised to raise taxes on Americans. Who could have known that was a mistake?

There’s another political cliché that says you never want to be on the wrong side of a 60–30 issue—meaning that candidates shouldn’t prioritize niche interests over what the majority favors.

Trump just found himself on the wrong side of a 60–20 issue. If you’re wondering how the Democrats could have pulled off such a stunning landslide last night, that’s a good place to start.

The post How Did Republicans Lose This Badly? Voters Turned Against Trump's Tariffs. appeared first on Reason Magazine.

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Italy’s proposed 2027 budget includes a new 25 percent exit tax on wealthy residents who move their tax residence abroad with at least €800,000 (about $896,450) in assets. The tax would apply to investment gains that have accumulated but have not yet been realized through a sale, provided the individual lived in Italy for at least six of the previous 10 years. People moving to the European Union or certain other countries could delay paying the tax until they actually sell their investments, but they would still have to pay 50 percent of the tax up front. Critics argue that the proposal is poorly defined, creates uncertainty for investors, and could discourage wealthy people and businesses from moving to or remaining in Italy. The proposal is modeled partly on France’s exit tax, but Italy’s version appears more restrictive because of its up-front payment requirement.

The post Brickbat: Exit Toll appeared first on Reason Magazine.