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.

Are Three Decent Republican Senators All it Would Take?

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The refusal of Congressional Republicans to confront Trump is breathtaking.

By all appearances, they’re the last – and most critical – domino that must fall in order for Trump to be removed. Many in the conservative media no longer will defend Trump. Yes, Fox News still is hanging on, as is Rush Limbaugh, but conservative journalists as a group largely have given up. And some, Joe Scarborough for example, are among Trump’s harshest critics. The public has abandoned Trump as well. The latest poll on his approval rating, placing it at 36%, was taken before the Comey firing. And you don’t see many former Republican office holders flocking to Trump’s defense.

Yet, with few exceptions, Ryan, McConnell and the rest of the gang that control both houses of Congress have barely budged.

So, what would it take to move them?

Theoretically, as few as three Republican Senators with a shred of decency could make it happen. And there are possibilities: McCain, Flake, Corker, Collins, Murkowski, maybe even Burr.

Why three?

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Privileging the Income of the Privileged

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[Cross-posted from Inequality.org]

The Trump tax plan reserves its highest rates for the income people actually labor to earn — and extends lavish preferential treatment to income from wealth.

Four years ago, my Institute for Policy Studies colleague Sam Pizzigati and I observed in the Los Angeles Times that we effectively have two tax systems in America: one that taxes wealth and the income derived from wealth and another that taxes the income from labor. Since 1980, the first of those systems, the “wealth-based system,” has become more forgiving. The “labor-based system,” by contrast, has become increasingly harsh, and a major chunk of the second system’s tax base has migrated into the first.

Those trends obviously place increasing pressure on the labor-based system. Ultimately, we noted, the movement towards complete reliance on the labor-based system would be unsustainable.

But President Trump disagrees. His recently announced tax proposal takes a giant step towards completely eliminating taxes on wealth.

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Yuuuge Milestone for Yours Truly

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…And when the radical priest Come to get me released We was all on the cover of Newsweek Paul Simon, in Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard Okay, okay, it’s not quite on the cover of Newsweek, but my opinion piece, which I think is my best product ever, just went up at Newsweek.com: … Read more

When Newspaper Editorials Belabor the Obvious, is the End Near?

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In its lead editorial on Tuesday, Donald Trump Embraces Another Despot, the New York Times was unsparing in its criticism of Trump’s invitation to Rodrigo Duterte, President of the Philippines, to visit the White House. The Times’ editorial was dead on. There was not a word with which I disagreed. The editorial was well written. In sum, the editorial said what needed to be said, and said it well.

It also was deeply disturbing that the Times ran it.

Why?

Because the call was too easy. Consider this passage:

After his election last year, Mr. Duterte took the killing campaign nationwide, effectively giving free license to the police and vigilantes. He has boasted about his tenure in Davao, and admitted to personally killing three kidnappers without trial. The mayhem got so bad that last week a Filipino lawyer formally asked the International Criminal Court to charge Mr. Duterte and 11 officials with mass murder and crimes against humanity over the extrajudicial killings of nearly 10,000 people over the past three decades.

Should Americans need the Times to explain to them why Trump’s invitation to Duterte was dead wrong?

Yet many do. 

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Book Review: Killing the Host

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I finally got around to reading Michael Hudson’s Killing the Host. I think it was released over a year ago. Hudson is a professor of economics at University of Missouri, Kansas City, which is where some of the most progressive work is being done, particularly in monetary theory. This book is not especially well written. … Read more