Next week's election is a pivotal one for Colorado, as voters will decide a pair of ballot questions that could secure the state's low-tax, small-government reputation—or shatter it.

Confusingly, there is a slim possibility that they decide to do both. More on that in a moment.

The two competing ballot measures could hardly be more different. The first, Proposition 136, would cap individual and corporate income taxes at 4.4 percent—the state's current flat rate.

The other, Amendment 87, would rewrite the state's constitution to allow for a progressive income tax. It would also set new rates, ranging from 7.4 percent on income over $500,000 to 8.4 percent on income over $1 million. And it would offer a modest tax cut to the lower end of the income spectrum: Individuals earning less than $100,000 would pay 4.2 percent, while those earning less than $25,000 would pay 3.7 percent.

Even with those offsets, Amendment 87 would be a massive tax increase. Both advocates and opponents agree that it would generate about $2–3 billion in additional annual revenue for the state government.

For now, the higher tax rates created by Amendment 87 would only apply to incomes over $500,000. Unsurprisingly, supporters of the measure are framing this as an opportunity to make the wealthy "pay their fair share."

There are two reasons why that argument is a bit deceiving.

As Jared Walczak, a senior fellow at the Tax Foundation, points out, "the new rates would be statutory, while the authorization for a graduated-rate tax would be enshrined in the constitution, permitting the legislature to adjust rates later." Lawmakers would not have to get permission from the voters to make those changes, so Coloradans would be trading away their flat income tax for a new model where income taxes could be hiked by the legislature at any time.

Second, the new rates are not indexed to inflation. As a result, "a household making $450,000 a year in today's dollars would be moved into a higher tax bracket within eight years if their earnings increased by 3% annually," reports The Colorado Sun, which crunched the numbers. Such "bracket creep" would also push more workers over the $100,000 threshold, nullifying the small tax cut for workers making less than that.

Politically, the progressive income tax proposal is dividing Democrats. The Colorado Democratic Party has endorsed Amendment 87 (along with many of its usual allies, like the AFL-CIO and the state's largest teachers union).

But Democratic Gov. Jared Polis has called the proposal "a huge blank check to politicians" that will "cripple our economy and reduce jobs."

In comments to a Denver TV station, Polis also highlighted how higher taxes in Colorado would make the state less competitive with its neighbors. "Utah has a very similar tax rate to what we have. If ours is double, we can't compete for businesses," Polis told Denver7. "It's game over. We will not be able to attract new employers to Colorado if the voters adopt this."

It's not just Utah. If the amendment passes, Colorado would have a significantly higher top income tax rate than any of its neighbors. (The current highest in that group is New Mexico, with its top rate of 5.9 percent.)

Under Colorado law, constitutional amendments typically need 55 percent approval to pass. However, Amendment 87 requires only a simple majority* because it technically repeals provisions in the constitution, rather than adding new ones. Similarly, Proposition 136—the one that would cap the income tax rate at 4.4 percent—requires just a simple majority.

It is possible, though unlikely, that both could pass. That would create a conflict, since the state's income tax can't be capped at 4.4 percent and also hiked to more than 7 percent on incomes over $500,000.

If that happens, the ballot question with the larger share of support would win, per state law. "In short, that means Amendment 87 would need to both win majority support from voters and surpass Proposition 136 in total votes to go into effect," explains the Denver Post, which has encouraged residents to vote against both ballot measures.

Accordingly, Proposition 136 must win majority support from the voters and surpass Amendment 87 (which needs 55 percent to pass, don't forget) to be implemented.

It is all a bit confusing, but the outcomes are worth watching. Colorado has long been a bit of an outlier among "blue" states for its relatively low taxes and booming population. It's now up to the voters to decide if that remains true.

*CORRECTION: This article incorrectly described how Amendment 87 could be passed into law. 

The post Jared Polis Warns Colorado's Progressive Tax Ballot Measure Could 'Cripple' the Economy appeared first on Reason Magazine.

When the White House rolled back tariffs on coffee, fruit, beef, and farm equipment, it was effectively an admission that the tariffs were raising prices—and that Americans, not foreigners, had been paying for them.

Now, in the closing stages of the midterm campaign, the White House is once again rolling back some of those import taxes—and once again making an awkward implicit admission.

President Donald Trump's tariffs have become politically toxic.

The administration announced late last week that it would lift the 50 percent tariffs on some Canadian imports, apparently in an attempt to help Sen. Susan Collins (R–Maine) survive a tough reelection campaign in which the tariffs have played a significant role.

If this is indeed an attempt to sway voters in Maine, it is not a very convincing one. The Trump administration is removing tariffs on some agricultural and mechanical goods, as well as packaging and plywood, The Wall Street Journal reports. But Trump is also imposing new 50 percent tariffs on "other Canadian goods, including carpet, certain valves, and waste products."

Collins issued a statement thanking the White House for the changes. This is what members of the U.S. Senate have been reduced to—begging the president to cast his capricious, tariff-happy eyes toward products that will hurt people in other states more than in your own. (In fairness to Collons, she has voted repeatedly to roll back Trump's tariffs, but not enough of her fellow Republicans went along with it.)

Still, it's worth asking: What exactly is the pitch to voters here? Here's a tariff cut, now vote for Republicans so the president can continue to arbitrarily tax imports whenever the mood strikes?

It's easy to see why Trump's tariffs have become so unpopular. They are a huge and broad tax increase—the Tax Foundation estimates that 54 percent of imports are subject to Trump's tariffs, which are costing the average household about $1,000 annually—that was imposed without congressional authorization or popular support. They create more losers than winners, as downstream businesses and consumers pay the price for the protectionism offered to American manufacturers. Even the supposed "winners" of the tariff policy tend also to be "losers," since so much manufacturing depends on importing raw materials and intermediate goods.

Perhaps more surprising is how unwilling Republicans are to defend the president's signature economic policy. Or to even talk about it.

The Wall Street Journal's Greg Ip crunched the numbers and found that House GOP candidates have not run a single ad talking about the tariffs during this election cycle.

Just such a fun chart here from @greg_ip. If only we could tease out some meaning. Ah, well, nevertheless. pic.twitter.com/1X4AWcWQMV

— Scott Lincicome (@scottlincicome) October 23, 2026

That silence speaks volumes. Trump says "tariff" is "the most beautiful word in the dictionary." But it is now "one of the most hated words in politics," writes Ip.

The only Republicans to mention trade or tariffs in a campaign ad, as far as I've seen, is former Rep. Mike Rogers, who is now running for the Senate seat in Michigan (and thus was not included in Ip's analysis). And he's calling for an end to the "tariff war."

There is a lesson here that hopefully will linger beyond the next week: If you support a policy that deliberately and unlawfully raises taxes and prices, voters will not reward you for it.

It's a lesson that the Republican Party learned long ago, but apparently forgot.

Against economists' advice, a Republican-led government in 1930 implemented a huge tariff hike intended to protect American farms and factories at the start of the Great Depression. Instead, those tariffs worsened economic conditions and triggered foreign retaliation.

When voters went to the polls in 1930, the first midterm after the Smoot-Hawley tariffs were passed, they registered their displeasure. The GOP lost 52 seats in the House that year. Two years later, an even larger landslide would sweep Democrats into power in Congress and the White House, ushering in the New Deal era that reshaped the federal government forever. The two lawmakers who lent their names to the legislation were among those who lost their seats, fittingly.

The most notable difference this time around is that Congress didn't actually pass a tariff bill. The trade barriers were instead imposed directly by the executive. Voters don't seem to care. Republicans were too cowardly to stand up to Trump's unilateral power grab, and now they seem too ashamed to try to defend that policy (and their largely complicit response) on the campaign trail.

As they say, those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it. And "doomed" may be a fitting way to describe the Republican majority in Congress right now, thanks in no small part to Trump's tariffs.

The post Trump's Tariffs Are Politically Toxic appeared first on Reason Magazine.

If you're reading this, then the internet still works. But that's something that we shouldn't necessarily take for granted after this week's global cybersecurity meltdown.

"Think of it this way: someone discovered that millions of buildings in the country have the same broken lock, and now everyone knows how to open it," writes Matt Shumer in a lengthy post on X about the situation. "The lock maker has sent out a fix, but every building owner has to install it themselves, and many haven't yet."

That massive vulnerability was identified with the help of AI, but the growing capabilities of AI-powered hackers mean that vulnerabilities can be exploited much more rapidly too.

This is the world we live in now. In August, more than 100 tech companies signed a letter warning about exactly this possibility. On Thursday, one of Anthropic's top information security officers wrote that cybersecurity threats "are going to get a lot worse before they get better." Major banks are rushing to secure themselves after reports of autonomous agents operating inside accounts (though many of them may have been authorized by account holders).

This is unlikely to be the last incident like this. Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike says it saw twice as many "agentic intrusions" (hacking done by an autonomous or semiautonomous AI) in August as in July, and then the number doubled again in September.

Scary stuff, for sure. As is usually the case, however, prevention is better than panic.

Shumer's post contains many helpful suggestions for better online security—it is particularly important to secure your email accounts, since that is the gateway to so much of what we do online. Here's a 15-step plan to stay more digitally secure in the AI age. (And if you're really worried about everything falling to bits, Reason's got you covered there too.) If your devices and browsers have updates available, install them. And for the love of digital gods, don't click on random links in strange emails!

The man who (maybe) saved the internet? There is an old XKCD webcomic—and I'm dating myself as a very specific type of millennial by even referencing that—that seems to perfectly sum up what happened this week. Here it is:

Here's the craziest part: That's basically true! Except the one random person lives in Czechia instead of Nebraska. His name is Ondřej Surý, and The Atlantic's Charlie Warzel found him:

Surý, who lives in Czechia, does not work for the PHP Foundation. But alongside his day job as director of domain-name-system engineering at the nonprofit Internet Systems Consortium, in a volunteer capacity, he maintains and helps automate patches for the coding language. His work, with that of just a handful of others, has allowed countless websites and organizations to fix these vulnerabilities quickly. Over the past 48 hours, he's become arguably the unsung hero of the entire internet—despite the fact that the only compensation he receives is from modest donations. "Ondřej will save the internet today," a user in the PHP Subreddit wrote.

In the war between AI hackers and AI defenders, it's still humans who are the heroes. At least for now.

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Art of the steal. Yesterday, in this space, I detailed how voters are fed up with the Trump administration's seemingly endless stream of corruption. But it's been a whole 24 hours, which means there is yet another scandal in the news—thanks to a Vanity Fair article about President Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner.

The article is an excerpt from a forthcoming book. In it, author Matthew Cole claims that Dutch investigators gained access to Kushner's phone with the help of Russian hackers. The evidence from the phone and other sources shows that Kushner has been taking money from the governments of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to "push their agenda with Trump."

Kushner says the article's claims are "outrageous and categorically false."

But wait, there's yet another corruption story. The Justice Department is reportedly probing whether Trump ally Corey Lewandowski profited from his role as a top adviser at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The Washington Post reports that the investigation is based on a referral from the DHS inspector general and is focused on "contracting fraud."

It may or may not be connected to other allegations that surfaced in September, when The Wall Street Journal reported that Lewandowski approached officials in Qatar and the UAE about being hired to help with "visa issues" and other matters.

In both matters, Lewandowski has denied the allegations. He's no longer working for the department, having been fired earlier this year amid a messy scandal involving then–DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, who was also canned.

---

Scenes from Virginia: Federal prosecutors indicted state Sen. L. Louise Lucas (D–Portsmouth), one of the most powerful Democrats in Virginia, on charges of racketeering and money laundering in connection with illegal marijuana sales. (Don't get me started on how dumb it is that recreational marijuana use has been legal here since 2021, but commercial sales are still forbidden. If it's legal to use something, it should be legal to sell it!)

Lucas pushed the failed Virginia redistricting effort and has been an outspoken critic of Trump. She plans to fight the charges. Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger, also a Democrat, said in a statement that the timing of the indictment, just days before the midterm elections, "further erodes the trust the American people deserve to have in the Department of Justice."

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QUICK HITS

• "The last thing José García-Sorto remembers after being shot in the chest is being pulled from his car, pinned to the pavement and handcuffed, his blood pooling around him on a Phoenix interstate. All he could think about was what would happen to his two young children if he died." The New York Times has a harrowing account of a Honduran immigrant who was shot by immigration officers last year. He's never been charged with a crime in connection with the incident, which suggests "the authorities did not find evidence that he had put anyone in danger."
• Phil Magness and David Hebert debunk the notion that tariffs can help "infant industries" grow and succeed in a global market.
• The Cato Institute's annual ranking of "Freedom in the 50 States" is out. Arizona takes the top spot. How did your state do?
• Is alchemy real now? A California company claims it has successfully turned mercury into gold.
• The World Series begins tonight, and it ought to be terrific. Despite low payrolls, Tampa Bay and Milwaukee were the top teams in their respective leagues this year. They are deep, talented teams full of characters worth cheering—Brewers' star pitcher Jacob Misiorowski is a huge Pokémon nerd; Rays' star hitter Yandy Diaz escaped from Cuba after being imprisoned there. And this is the first World Series since 1980 to match two franchises that have never won a championship.

The post The Man Who Saved the Internet appeared first on Reason Magazine.

An uncanny strength of the second Trump administration has been its ability to be involved in so many scandals that no single one seems to become a dominant story.

Take the most recent allegations about Alina Habba, Trump's former personal defense attorney, who recently landed a plush gig working for Julio Herrera Velutini, a Venezuelan banker. Habba will get $50 million over five years to do unspecified work for a company that barely exists, according to The New York Times, while Herrera got a presidential pardon for a 2025 campaign finance charge.

That's just a typical day for the current White House, where the mingling of personal and public business has become routine. Some days, the story is President Donald Trump trying to help himself to taxpayer funds by suing the government he runs, or shipping billions of taxpayer dollars to a foreign mining company partially owned by his sons. Other times, it is Trump selling political influence in the form of digital coins, or his appointees getting caught in naked pay-to-play schemes. If you have a hard time keeping track of it all, I get it. The corruption is so deep and wide that focusing on any singular item becomes difficult.

But that constellation of corruption might finally be breaking through to voters ahead of next month's midterm elections.

A recent Fox News poll found that "government corruption" was the top issue for voters, ranking ahead of inflation and gas prices. Conservative commentators are taking notice.

"What they're saying is, 'Look, we're tired of you getting rich and us getting poor,'" former White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney said this week.

Tim Carney, senior columnist at the conservative Washington Examiner, also tabs the corruption issue—along with other "avoidable mistakes" such as the Iran War and tariffs—as one of the major reasons why Democrats are likely to win the midterms:

Trump and his family have enriched themselves in this second term in ways more similar to third-world regimes or Cook County than to any previous administration. He and his family operate a financial company that has received heavy investments from Qatar's government. He's sold access to himself by selling otherwise worthless cryptocurrency. The IRS he controls settled a lawsuit with him, promising to pay him $1.8 billion (this settlement was voided by a judge).

Trump is not directly on the ballot next month, of course. And most voters might not be able to tell you the details of any single Trump scandal in detail. Even so, this may turn out to be the defining narrative of the second Trump administration, and there seems to be a growing consensus that Republicans have allowed (if not aided and abetted) his corrupt behavior, so it's time to give Democrats a shot at reining it in.

The Trump corruption issue is like the Biden cognitive decline issue in one key sense: Everyone around the president or even supporting him professionally from afar should be asked about it, and their lies/claims of ignorance should be hung around their necks like dumbbells.

— Matt Welch (@MattWelch) October 20, 2026

Vice President J.D. Vance told journalist Mark Halperin this week that he's "never seen any evidence that anybody's selling access to the president." When Halperin pushed back, Vance doubled down: "What I would say is I don't think there's evidence that the Trump family has become enriched by politics," the vice president said.

So either Vance isn't paying attention, or he's deliberately misleading. "Credit to Vance, it's as good an argument as is available to him," writes Daniel Foster at National Review. "The bad news is it's still not very good."

---

The internet nearly crashed on Wednesday as digital security and website administrators scrambled to patch two vulnerabilities in the PHP programming language that serves as the basis for many websites.

"Since its development in the 1990s, PHP has evolved into an essential scripting language for web development and is used across vast swaths of the internet in websites and software," explains Wired. "Everything from publishing systems like WordPress and Drupal to e-commerce platforms like Adobe's Magento are built on PHP."

Amid fears that hackers and AI agents could exploit the security weakness, many websites were taken offline. The National Security Agency and its counterparts in the United Kingdom and the European Union sounded the alarm. Even the prime minister of Japan, Sanae Takaichi, was telling website administrators to take the issue seriously.

The potential hacking abilities of advanced AI agents make these sorts of security risks more serious. In this case, however, the problem was also identified with the help of AI.

"Ryan Austin, a researcher at Calif, uncovered the flaws with help from GPT-5.6 Sol, one of OpenAI's most advanced models, during an audit of PHP's source code in August," The Wall Street Journal reports. Another security researcher had flagged the issue years ago, but it had never been fixed because it was considered "considered too difficult to exploit" by human hackers.

This is the future of humanity's digital landscape. "Given the severity of these flaws and PHP's widespread use, we consider this one of the most impactful security issues in recent memory," OpenAI said in a statement on Wednesday. "It highlights how AI can uncover security flaws with internet-scale impact, but the same capabilities can also help attackers rapidly develop offensive tools and exploits."

(A shoutout to Reason's web development team for keeping us up and running, today and every day.)

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"Fanciful fiction." Media outlets also continue to face decidedly nondigital threats over articles and polls that make the president unhappy.

The White House threatened Politico on Wednesday with unspecified "consequences" for publishing "fanciful fiction" in a series of articles earlier this month about White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles. If the articles are not retracted, it would trigger "an immediate review of Politico's relationship with the White House, and, of course, consideration of all other appropriate and available legal remedies," wrote White House counsel William O. Scharf in a letter to the media outlet's publisher.

Meanwhile, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr issued vague threats to broadcasters who cover what Carr called "Fake Polls" intended to "alter the normal patterns of voter turnout and enthusiasm."

These sorts of threats are an affront to the First Amendment, of course. But they are downstream of a more significant issue: the very existence of the FCC.

It's a problem, obviously, that the FCC is run by an authoritarian jackass. But the bigger problem is that the agency contains so many tempting tools for an authoritarian jackass to wield. https://t.co/Q4IJXntkOy

— Jesse Walker (@notjessewalker) October 21, 2026

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QUICK HITS

• A judge in New Mexico ordered social media giant Meta (which owns Facebook and Instagram, among other things) to pay $25 billion for misleading users about data privacy. Last month, a jury found that Meta had violated the state's consumer protection laws 43 million times.
• Officials are trying to pin the blame on Elon Musk for a Starlink slowdown that limited the effectiveness of Ukrainian missile defenses. Musk says the decision was made by the U.S. military and Trump.
• Peter Thiel joins the majority of Americans in thinking that Trump's Iran War was a mistake. Even so, the U.S. and Israel are reportedly planning another round of attacks after the election.
• The environmental studies for California's high-speed rail line include such absurdities as counting bumblebees "one by one" and considering the train's "acoustic impacts on waterfowl and shorebirds." That's how to spend 16 years and $15 billion building nearly nothing.
• Obvious metaphor alert!

A group dispatched by Hegseth's team in February attempted to move the historic globe, said to be used by Eisenhower during World War II.

They lifted it from its home in an Army office in the Pentagon … and dropped it. pic.twitter.com/vTjWdYXn0k

— Dan Lamothe (@DanLamothe) October 22, 2026

The post The Swamp King appeared first on Reason Magazine.

A proposed "wealth tax" on California's billionaires could backfire and cost the state tens of billions of dollars in the long run.

If the proposed tax drives wealthier residents out of the state, California could end up losing between $1 billion and $3.5 billion annually in income taxes, according to a working paper published this week. A pair of researchers at Stanford University warn that the state could end up losing an estimated $39 billion because of the consequences of the wealth tax.

"These findings suggest that the Billionaire Tax Act will not fulfill the primary functions for which it was designed," write researchers Benjamin Jaros and Joshua Rauh.

Voters in California will decide next month whether to impose the one-time, 5 percent tax when they vote on Proposition 40. The ballot measure is dividing Democrats—Gov. Gavin Newsom opposes it, while progressive Rep. Ro Khanna (D–Calif.) claims it is the "most important ballot initiative in America and a fight for the soul of our party."

And it's already spurring some billionaires to flee the state—including venture capitalist Peter Thiel and Google co-founder Larry Page. Including those two, the seven billionaires who have publicly said they are leaving the state represent more than $539 billion of the nearly $1.9 trillion aggregate net worth of California's billionaires, the researchers note.

With other departures likely happening more quietly, the new study estimates that the tax will generate about $30 billion, a far cry from the $100 billion that the tax's supporters expect. The "behavioral response" from billionaires in California "has eroded most of the projected tax base," write Jaros and Rauh.

That's still a pretty big pot of revenue. In the long run, however, the state is likely to lose out.

After running 100,000 simulations using different assumptions, the two researchers report that "85 percent of plausible outcomes produce a negative" result in state revenue.

Other recent experiments with special taxes on wealth have backfired in similar ways. In response to a new wealth tax in Washington State, Jeff Bezos relocated to Florida, and iconic Seattle brand Starbucks shifted more of its corporate headquarters to Tennessee. Studies have shown that a "millionaires tax" in Massachusetts contributed to wealth moving out of that state.

Capital is always mobile, despite the best efforts of politicians. And if you were a billionaire living in California, why would you stick around?

Polls show voters are narrowly divided over Proposition 40. A Politico poll published earlier this month showed 46 percent of voters plan to vote for the measure, while 43 percent oppose it. Voters were similarly divided when asked if they expected it to pass or not.

The post California's 'Wealth Tax' Could Cost the State $39 Billion appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Social Security is racing towards insolvency because the program pays out more in benefits to retirees than it collects in taxes from working Americans.

Handing out even more generous benefits will make that situation worse. Yet that is exactly what the trustees who run Social Security are planning to do: Retirees will get a 3.6 percent cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) next year. That increase is 0.8 percentage points higher than last year's, and it is 0.9 percentage points higher than what Social Security was expecting to pay.

The Social Security trustees are doing what the law requires during a time of high inflation. That's why Congress ought to intervene here.

It should cancel the COLA.

No, this isn't a demand that lawmakers stick it to America's retirees. It's an appeal for some fiscal common sense. There are three good reasons to cancel this year's COLA.

First: Handing out higher benefits to wealthy retirees simply doesn't make sense when Social Security is trending towards insolvency.

As the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget notes, the announced COLA would be a $900 increase in benefits for the average retired household—but some retirees could receive as much as $3,600 more.

Paying generous benefits to wealthy households is the main reason Social Security is facing insolvency in the first place. A program originally intended to keep seniors from falling into poverty has become a huge wealth-transfer scheme that overwhelmingly benefits those who don't need the handouts. The COLA doubles down on this flaw.

Second: What about the workers who are paying for those lavish benefits? Wages have risen by 3 percent, on average, over the past year. Those pay increases have already been outpaced by inflation, which is up 3.7 percent in the past 12 months.

You'll often hear retirees talk about how they are living on a "fixed income," but the math simply doesn't bear this out. Social Security beneficiaries will get a COLA that is larger than the average pay increase for the workers who are funding the COLA. Retirees are protected from the impact of inflation while younger Americans must deal with inflation and finance that protection for the elderly. That's crazy.

Third: Cutting the COLA could kick-start a conversation about how to solve Social Security's looming insolvency. The Social Security trustees estimate that an across-the-board cut of about 22 percent will be necessary in 2032. Eliminating COLAs won't meaningfully change that arithmetic, but it would change the conversation—which has for too long been dominated by politicians promising seniors that nothing needs to change. That's wrong—and the sooner that becomes apparent, the better off the political system will be.

If eliminating the COLA is too radical a change, Congress should instead change how the trustees calculate the annual increase.

Currently, the COLA is based on one particular measure of inflation: the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers, otherwise known as CPI-W. This is a relatively narrow index that reflects the spending habits of only about one-third of all Americans, as Romina Boccia points out in her newletter, The Debt Dispatch. 

Instead, Boccia suggests using the Chained Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers, or C-CPI-U, which covers about 93 percent of all Americans and is generally regarded as a better measure of the rising cost of living. Other parts of the federal government already use C-CPI-U to update such things as tax brackets.

If Congress simply changed how Social Security's COLA was calculated, it could close 12 percent of the program's long-term shortfall. And while some retirees would see smaller COLAs as a result, the result would more closely match those increases to inflation.

Social Security's COLA reflects many of the fundamental flaws with America's old-age entitlement program. Like Social Security as a whole, it is too generous to the rich, too costly to the taxpayers, and too unfair to younger, poorer workers.

The post 3 Reasons To Cancel This Year's 3.6% Social Security Boost appeared first on Reason Magazine.

America's interminable war with Iran has killed thousands, disrupted commerce that flows through the Strait of Hormuz, and raised prices on the home front.

But there may be one silver lining. In an attempt to lower gas prices that spiked because of the war, the Trump administration has repeatedly issued waivers of the Jones Act, a century-old law that requires all goods moved between American ports to be carried on American-built, American-crewed ships.

With the law (temporarily) not being enforced, commerce has exploded.

Just look at how much propane has been shipped from the mainland United States to Puerto Rico, says Colin Grabow, a trade policy analyst at the Cato Institute and perhaps the nation's foremost advocate for abolishing the Jones Act.

Since March, when the first waiver was issued, Puerto Rico has imported more than 800,000 barrels of propane from the mainland. That's more than twice the amount of American propane shipped to Puerto Rico in the last 22 years combined.

America is one of the world's leading producers and exporters of propane, but the lack of Jones Act–compliant ships capable of carrying gas means that it has been nearly impossible to ship propane from the mainland to outlying parts of the country. In the past, Puerto Rico has imported gas from Nigeria, Chile, and elsewhere because those deliveries don't have to comply with the Jones Act.

For years, libertarians have argued that the Jones Act unfairly impoverishes American consumers and businesses that want to buy and sell things within the same country in order to artificially inflate the price of moving those things across water. Waiving the law seems to have proven that point: There are plenty of ships capable of moving gas and oil around the country as long as the government gets out of the way.

"The instant the Jones Act no longer applied to energy shipments, mainland propane displaced foreign imports, suggesting it had been the cheapest option all along," says Grabow.

Puerto Rico is hardly the only winner.

The Jones Act waivers are offering a glimpse into a world where the law doesn't exist. From March through mid-August, there had been 210 voyages completed that otherwise would have been deemed unlawful without the waivers, according to an analysis of Maritime Administration data by the Institute for Energy Research.

It's a world where American oil and natural gas can be more easily shipped from the Gulf Coast to New England, which had previously been importing energy from Russia and Europe. Another big winner is California, which had been importing gasoline from as far away as the Bahamas because it was nearly impossible to legally ship gas from Texas or Alaska to the West Coast.

President Donald Trump reupped the Jones Act waiver in mid-May. Another extension, issued in August, will last for 90 days but applies only to ships carrying energy products such as gas and oil. Before that waiver expires in November, lawmakers ought to kill the Jones Act permanently.

There is some irony in the fact that one of Trump's most successful policy maneuvers has paused a protectionist law that limited commerce, when so much else of his economic policy has been focused on erecting barriers to trade. It's also amusing that it was a war in the Middle East—something Trump pledged to avoid—that triggered this change.

Still, the proof is in the shipping. The free traders were right all along.

The post Trump's War With Iran Pushed Him To Waive a Century-Old Shipping Law. Commerce Boomed. appeared first on Reason Magazine.

As the Trump administration's short-lived Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) project implemented its plan to downsize the federal workforce, there was much wailing from the liberal institutions in Washington, D.C.

Federal employee unions filed lawsuits to block the effort. NPR ran profiles of federal workers who, for the first time, faced the prospect of potentially not having absolute job security forever. The Brookings Institution wondered how many jobs the federal government could shed before it crashes.

The answer: plenty. The Trump administration has cut more than 10 percent of the federal workforce, and the government hasn't crashed. Indeed, it hasn't even shrunk—if you're counting by dollars spent instead of people employed.

In a new article for City Journal, Manhattan Institute senior fellow Judge Glock highlights the tremendous gap between the dire predictions about DOGE's cuts and the reality that has emerged, more than a year after DOGE was shut down. Despite having only a modest impact on spending, Glock writes, DOGE "had a massive impact on the federal civil service."

This is true—to a point, more on that in a moment—and notable. Aside from a modest downsizing in the 1990s, the number of people employed by the federal government has been steadily growing for decades. Reversing that trend is one of the few genuinely libertarian accomplishments by the Trump administration.

The cuts to the federal workforce prove that "DOGE worked," argues Glock.

Well, hold on.

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy (who departed the DOGE project before Trump's inauguration and is now running for governor of Ohio) set some very ambitious goals after being appointed DOGE co-chairs in late 2024. In an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal in November 2024 where they promised "we won't just write reports or cut ribbons. We'll cut costs."

Musk repeatedly attached some rather absurd numbers to that promise. He said DOGE would cut $1 trillion or even $2 trillion in federal spending. In the end, it didn't come close. By DOGE's own (questionable) accounting, it cut $170 billion. Meanwhile, overall federal spending has increased in each of Trump's first two years in office, and the budget deficit has widened as well.

Yes, Musk and Ramaswamy also said they would reduce the federal workforce. But that was presented as a natural consequence of cutting spending, not as the primary goal.

Think about it like this. If I spent months promising my friends and family that I would lose 50 pounds on a new diet, and then didn't lose any weight, would it be fair to say the diet worked?

What if I reduced the number of donuts I eat every day, but still didn't lose any weight? Sure, that might be good for my health in some way—just like reducing unnecessary workers in the federal government is good for America's fiscal health—but it certainly wouldn't mean I had achieved the goal of losing weight.

Finally, even the claim that DOGE cut the federal workforce requires an asterisk. As Glock also notes in his report, the decline in federal workers has been offset by an increase in federal contractors.

It's not a one-for-one trade, of course. The new contractors are overwhelmingly concentrated in places like the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon, while the cuts mostly targeted other areas, like the Department of Health and Human Services.

"Most of that increase came from the buildup in homeland-security and defense contracting, including purchases such as surveillance aircraft and tanks, rather than substitutes for government workers," Glock writes. "DOGE achieved real contract savings, but these were more than offset by higher spending elsewhere, reflecting a shift in priorities rather than an overall reduction in contracting."

So, the government is eating fewer donuts but more pizza.

There might be libertarian reasons to prefer contractors over government employees. They are less likely to hold those jobs for life, for one. But there's nothing inherently good about a government policy that cuts jobs in some areas just to create more room in the budget for poorly trained immigration enforcement agents and defense contractors. That may even be a negative outcome for liberty.

In the end, the DOGE project looks less like a meaningful attempt at cutting government spending or employment levels and more like a way to purge parts of the federal workforce likely to get in Trump's way during his second term. "As long as [Trump's] larger commitment is to extending his power rather than rolling back power itself, you shouldn't expect the government to stop growing," as Reason's Jesse Walker wrote last year in comparing DOGE to President Richard Nixon's attempted purge of the civil service.

Did DOGE work? Only if you grade it on a pretty dramatic curve.

Yes, it proved that a president can slash bureaucratic jobs—particularly the bloated managerial and administrative types—without doing much damage to the government's core responsibilities. That's a lesson future administrations should remember.

Maybe, someday, a president will try applying the same logic to government spending too.

The post DOGE Worked? Only If You Grade on a Curve. appeared first on Reason Magazine.