Bob Lord

Bob has mostly wound down his 39-year career as a tax and business lawyer (with a 1-year interruption to run for Congress in 2008 (CD3), when he tried to unseat John Shadegg. Bob now serves as the senior advisor on tax policy for the Patriotic Millionaires, a group of wealthy Americans who believe the light taxation of America's rich is destabilizing our democracy, and as an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. Bob has been writing for Blog For Arizona since late 2011, concentrating mostly on federal issues, with an occasional foray into Arizona state politics.

Congress Made it Harder to Give Teachers Raises

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Distributed via OtherWords.org

[Note to readers: Due to technical difficulties, I’ve not been able to post for awhile, but the problem seems corrected. This is a piece I had published at our free syndication service. OtherWords.org, two weeks ago, for those who’ve not seen it elsewhere]

In just a few months, we’ve seen teachers in five states walk out of the classroom to protest their abysmal pay.

Stingy state budgets are mostly to blame for low teacher pay and poor school conditions, but there’s a federal tax connection, too. Unfortunately, last year’s Republican tax plan could make keeping good teachers in the classroom more difficult than ever.

Raising teacher pay requires money, which at some point requires new state tax revenue.

Now, most state taxpayers will tolerate tax increases when they know those taxes will fund education. But in many places, state lawmakers have only so much room to raise taxes before voters express their displeasure come election time.

The jam state governments may find themselves in is that Trump and his Republican friends in Congress effectively just increased state income and property taxes. A lot. Which means voters won’t be too keen to see another increase so soon.

How can Congress increase state taxes? By increasing the real cost of state taxes people already pay, that’s how.

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An Open Letter to Michelle Wolf

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Dear Michelle Wolf: I’ll keep this short. I’m one of the millions you inspired with your performance Saturday night. Whatever you do, please, please, don’t surrender to the attacks. Don’t apologize. The line drawing the fire, as you know, is your brilliant and courageous comparison of Sarah Huckabee Sanders to Aunt Lydia in the Handmaid’s … Read more

Comey’s Higher Loyalty: A Must Read

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I’ve noticed over the years that media coverage of books can be wildly at odds with my own impression, more so than media coverage of just about anything else.

There’s a logical explanation for that. It would be pretty much impossible to write a 300-page book and not get something wrong or include material that perhaps should have been left out.

The textbook case of this was the criticism of Jimmy Carter’s book, Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid. Alan Dershowitz (yeah, the pseudo-liberal currently defending Trump) and others found a handful of items Carter had wrong. Carter actually admitted to getting a few things wrong. Reading that criticism, I lost interest in the book, as Carter’s view also clashed with my own beliefs at the time about Israel-Palestine. Eventually, however, I read it. For everything Carter got wrong and for which he was lambasted by the pro-Israel American media, he got about 50 things right. Ultimately, the book had a profound influence on my own views.

We’re seeing a repeat of this with the media reporting on Comey’s book, A Higher Loyalty. In this case, it’s not as much things Comey got wrong, but passages he included that the media have labeled spiteful or petty. When you read A Higher Loyalty, however, you see that Comey’s critics are the ones engaged in spite and pettiness.

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Life in Interesting Times

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I’ve mused on these pages before about how it feels in the moment to be part of a society that has lost its collective sanity. Did Germans in the 30’s grasp what was happening, or were they like the proverbial frog in the pot of boiling water?

Are those suffering the curse of “living in interesting times” aware they’ve been cursed?

Reflect for a moment on current events in the country that deems itself exceptional:

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Just How Unequal Are America’s Major Corporations?

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Distributed via OtherWords.org

Pay scales at major U.S. businesses are way out of whack — and that’s just at the ones we know about.

That America’s income distribution has grown dramatically more unequal in the past 40 years is beyond debate. The share of the top 1 percent has doubled since 1980, to over 20 percent of all income.

Could it get any worse? A look at America’s large, privately held corporations suggests it could.

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