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.

Lemons’ Straight Talk on Arpaio

by

Posted by Bob Lord In 168 words, Steve Lemons, the best political reporter and best investigative journalist in Arizona, tells you why you must help the Recall Arpaio campaign in these last few days: Arpaio's 20-plus years in office are a result of being democratically elected six times by the voters of Maricopa County. In other words, … Read more

Our Democratic Party Establishment At Work

by

Posted by Bob Lord

If you want a primer on the incompetency (and, really, corruption) of the Democratic Party establishment, Down With Tyranny has a great take-down on DCCC chair Steve Israel and DNC chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, Can The Democrats Retake The House Next Year? 

On Israel:

As we mentioned before a few times, last year Israel very much did walk away from Jim Graves in his race against Michele Bachmann. After putting him on the Red to Blue list, Israel decided not to spend any money at all in the district. Bachmann spent $11,946,232 to Graves' $2,279,384 but he came a lot closer to beating her than many of Israel's handpicked candidates where the DCCC spent millions. The 4,197 votes by which Bachmann beat Graves would certainly have been made up had the DCCC spent the kind of money in MN-06 that they spent bolstering losing candidates like Blue Dog Gary McDowell (1,282,979), Blue Dog Brendan Mullen ($483,721), New Dem Julian Schreibman ($2,037,612), Joe Oceguera ($2,649,541) or Pat Kreitlow ($2,069,595) to name a few.

On Wasserman-Schultz:

Still Time to Recall Arpaio, Especially if Dem Candidates Help

by

Posted by Bob Lord As the BlueMeanie has reported, a Federal judge has found that Joe Arpaio engaged in racial profiling of Latinos.  It's no surprise, but It's also beyond despicable. This explains why Respect Arizona launched the recall campaign when they did. They knew Arpaio was doing this. You see, many of them were … Read more

Sorry, Ezra, It’s Not That Easy

by

Posted by Bob Lord

In the wake of the Senate hearings on Apple's tax shenanigans, a gaggle of opinion writers, including left-leaning Ezra Klein of the Washington Post, are urging the elimination of the corporate income tax altogether, with increased taxes on dividends and capital gains to replace the lost revenue. You can find Ezra's piece here and two others here and here.

Although these people raise valid points in their criticism of the corporate income tax, they’re seemingly ignoring two huge coutervailing considerations:   

First, as I've been reporting in a series at inequality.org,, much of our wealth is now held in massive tax-exempt pools, which are not subject to current taxation on dividend and capital gain income. Citizens for Tax Justice found that two-thirds of dividends flow to tax-exempt organizations. And if two-thirds of dividends go to tax-exempt organizations, two-thirds of capital gains on corporate stock sales also do. So, we can't just "tax the income at the shareholder level instead."

Is Congress Tweeting While America Burns?

by

Posted by Bob Lord This one has to be short — billable work to do. But I just stumbled on to a must read, How America Became a Third World Country, by Mattea Kramer and Jo Comerford. They take us out ten years from today, after ten years under sequestration. It's an ugly picture and, … Read more