Pun Salad

So am I excepted from Eric Boehm's damnation?

Well, if you prefer text, Eric's article is headlined: You are paying for retirees' lavish lifestyles.

I'll admit to a slight mea culpa: Although I don't live a "lavish lifestyle", and I don't play golf or pickleball, my retirement fund is pretty healthy. And I'm pretty sure I won't be taking it with me, so it will end up in the grubby hands of my non-boomer kids.

Still, Eric makes some solid points against "Total Boomer Luxury Communism". The day of reckoning for entitlements is drawing closer day by day, so it will be interesting to see if push-grandma-off-the-cliff demagoguery will make a reappearance.

Also of note:

• Or they could pick my pocket this way. Mitch Daniels (slightly older than I) sees a Consumption Tax on the Horizon.

  At some point, a much broader segment of society will now, unfairly, have to start paying for the irresponsibility of the previous generation of national leadership. This could have been avoided or limited by action over the years. But by now the refusal to reform entitlements means that saving the safety-net programs as they go broke will require major new taxes on millions who are paying little or none today.

  Those socially conscious Europeans, whatever fiscal messes they have created for themselves, have had no qualms about taxing their whole populations. The primary vehicle is sales taxation, in the form of value-added taxes, which accumulate along a product’s value chain and are ultimately paid by the consumer. VATs extract roughly 9 percent to 10 percent of middle-class incomes across the euro zone and can result in middle-income citizens paying for nearly half of all VAT revenue. Every country in the 38-member Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development except the United States has one.

  That’s a major reason the US, frequent misrepresentations to the contrary, has the most progressive tax system among the most developed countries. Here, the top 10 percent pay about 70 percent of US income taxes, and more than half the total US taxes even when payroll taxes are included. The dreaded 1 percent pick up more than a quarter of the entire federal tab.

  The funny thing (for suitably small values of "funny") is: when I first started squirrelling money into my IRA, the sales pitch at the time was: "the money you take out will be taxable, but you'll probably be in a lower tax bracket".

  Guess what? I'm not!

  And if they add a consumption tax on top… Eek!

• This is why the kids invented the "SMH" acronym. Jacob Sullum points out some delusional language: Trump habitually warns 'we won’t have a country' without him.

  If Iran's leaders continue to resist U.S. demands, President Donald Trump warned on Sunday night, "they're not going to have a country." That remark was ominous in the context of a war that has included a huge military deployment, attacks on thousands of targets, threats to destroy civilian infrastructure, and the possibility of a ground invasion. But Trump frequently has deployed similar language much less credibly, warning Americans that they "won't have a country anymore" if certain things are allowed to happen.

  Much like his notion of what constitutes a "national emergency," Trump's perception of existential threats to the republic is highly idiosyncratic. It includes concerns, such as crime and terrorism, that are plausible but fall far short of threatening to destroy the country. It includes illegal immigration, which Trump has long portrayed as inherently dangerous, regardless of whether unauthorized residents are committing crimes or making an honest, peaceful living. It includes Democratic electoral victories. It even includes constitutionally protected criticism of Trump.

  If we don't "get tough and smart" on Islamic terrorism, Trump warned on Twitter in January 2016, "we won't have a country anymore!"

  Jacob's link-heavy bottom line:

  The unifying theme in Trump's warnings about the nation's imminent demise is that America's continued existence depends on supporting him: electing him, praising him, and backing his policies. Americans who oppose Trump therefore are betraying their country, which helps explain his habitual accusation that his critics are guilty of treason.

  Both rhetorical tics reflect the narcissistic authoritarianism that underlies much of what Trump says and does, whether it is declaring nonexistent crises, waging war without congressional approval, summarily executing suspected cocaine smugglers, asserting unlimited tariff authority, attempting to rewrite statutes or the Constitution by presidential decree, demanding impeachment of judges who rule against him, using the criminal justice system to punish his foes, or threatening people who say things he does not like with deportation, regulatory penalties, grant revocations, or other unpleasant consequences. As Trump sees it, extreme measures are necessary when the fate of the nation is at stake, which it always seems to be.

  I'm not a fan of armchair psychoanalysis, but how do you explain this behavior without resorting to terms like "narcissistic authoritarianis"?

• Doomed to repeat it. Jeffrey Blehar sees only bleakness ahead: ‘No Kings’ Anti-Trump Protests Have No Future.

  Saturday’s nationwide “No Kings” rally descended on Chicago like a long-anticipated cicada bloom that I have no excuse for not planning around. I ignored all the warning signs: the regular public service announcements on NPR that week encouraging my attendance; the sudden disappearance of lunch and dinner reservations at pricey restaurants in the West Loop; the chittering din of septuagenarian Trotskyists and blue-haired grandmothers as they scuttled from their hidey-holes in the North Shore to gather agitatedly in Grant Park.

  Yes, “Brood Boomer” reassembled downtown for a reprise of last October’s similarly senior-heavy affair, a “No Kings” protest against — well, what? Deportations of illegals? The potential quagmire of an Iran war? Our cynically mercantilist adventure in Venezuela? That tacky White House ballroom? They were opposed to all of these things, and more — they were opposed to the simple existence of the Trump administration, in all its unanswerable egregiousness.

  And why not? Were I a Democrat right now, I’d be pretty miffed about the course of national politics. (I’m a Republican, and I’m not exactly thrilled myself.) It’s America, and everyone has a right to gripe. But all of the observations I made about the demography of the “No Kings” rally-goers back last year applied in redoubled measure to this year’s attending class: These people were overwhelmingly old, white, deeply elite progressives, and vastly fewer in number this second time around.

  Well, I'm old and white. I'd fit right in, except for the "deeply elite progressive" part.

• But when he's right… Attention should be paid to Randy Barnett, who claims, in the WSJ that Trump Is Right on Birthright Citizenship. (WSJ gifted link)

  President Trump’s executive order denying birthright citizenship to U.S.-born children of nonresident aliens goes before the Supreme Court Wednesday, and conventional wisdom has it that the president will lose in Trump v. Barbara. If the court stays true to the original meaning of the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause, however, the conventional wisdom will prove wrong.

  The clause grants citizenship to persons who meet two conditions: birth in the U.S. and being “subject to the jurisdiction” of the U.S. The dispute is over the meaning of the latter term. Everyone agrees that it excludes at least three classes: children of diplomats, of soldiers from an invading army, and of American Indians maintaining tribal relations. In each of these categories, the status of the child depended on the status of the parent.

  The constitutional debate is about the original concept embodied in the text that explains these exclusions and whether that concept embraces or excludes children born on U.S. soil to parents who are unlawfully or temporarily in the U.S. The court has never squarely addressed this question.

  Randy could be right. He's a pretty sharp guy.