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.

My View: Blaming the DACA Debacle on Schumer Is Absurd

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Almost always, if you compare my view on an issue to the Blue Meanie’s, mine will be the more progressive.

Almost.

But not this time. AZBM recently shared his view, easily the majority view of progressives, that Chuck Schumer was a worse negotiator even than Trump.

I really, really wish Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi were not the face of the Democratic Party. So Schumer taking heat here from the base doesn’t bother me personally. But objectively, it’s wrong.

Yes, the DACA situation is horrific and it was frustrating to see Schumer and the Senate Democrats not save the Dreamers. But blame would be appropriate only if a better result was achievable, and I don’t see how that’s so.

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An Open Letter to John McCain: Consider Your Legacy, Senator

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Dear Senator McCain: As the Senate vote on the House-Senate conference committee tax bill approaches, we urge you to consider your legacy and ask yourself this very basic question: Do you want your last political act – your final legacy — to be one of rank hypocrisy, by all appearances motivated by the selfish desire … Read more

The Kate’s Law Parlay: A Bad Outcome on an Insane Bet

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Two years ago, Donald Trump chose to demagogue a tragic death into political hay. Jose Ines Garcia Zarate, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico who had entered the country illegally five times, had killed Kate Steinle, a 32-year-old American.

Trump seized on the incident, using it to champion a law, which he dubbed “Kate’s Law,” that would sentence all second-time illegal border crossers to a minimum prison term of five years.

When I learned of this, I wrote about the absurdity of the proposed law in The Mystifying Math of Kate’s Law and Kate’s Law Sinking?. We would be criminalizing an act that is wrong only because we define it to be — crossing the border twice without proper documents —  based on some imaginary correlation between that act and violent crimes. And all based on the actions of one — that’s right, one — undocumented immigrant.

When I read about this two years ago, I assumed that the actual case against Zarate was airtight and that his taking of Steinle’s life was an especially heinous act.

Bad assumption on my part.

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Inside the Pity-Our-Farmers Tax ‘Reform’ Scam

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No farm families, repeat no farm families, are losing their family farms to the federal estate tax. The politicians currently scheming to repeal the federal estate tax — America’s only tax levy on grand concentrations of private wealth — don’t have any good arguments to make. They have only bogus sob stories. The most bogus … Read more