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.

Taibbi on “Shattered”: A Book Review Perhaps More Important than the Book

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I’ve been told by friends I should read Shattered, the devastating takedown of the Clinton 2016 campaign by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes. I may, but it’s not high on my priority list. That’s not to say it’s uninteresting or poorly written. From all I’ve read, it’s a really good work, and a page turner.

I’m just not sure I should spend hours on gory details that do nothing more than confirm what I already believe.

I did spend the few minutes required to read Matt Taibbi’s review of the book, and am glad I did. Taibbi’s intellect is as keen as any journalist out there. In this case, his takeaways from the book, not about the Clinton campaign, but about the Democratic Party, the Democratic establishment, and American political campaigns, have more long-lasting relevance than Shattered itself. Taibbi:

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A Piketty ‘Inflection Point’ Heads Up

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[Cross-Posted from Inequality.org]

The concentration of America’s wealth may be reaching a point where any further gains for the top 1 percent must literally come at the direct expense of everyone else.

 

The exquisitely succinct equation at the heart of Thomas Piketty’s best-selling Capital in the Twenty-First Century — r  > g — has impressed readers worldwide. Just three symbols. Even Einstein, for his masterwork, needed five.

Piketty’s core principle: The rate of return on the investments the wealthy make will normally be greater than the rate of growth in a nation’s economy and total wealth.

Piketty considers the three decades right after World War II an exception to his rule. In those anomalous postwar years, the French economist explains, the rebuilding required after Europe’s destruction generated a rate of growth, g, not sustainable in the long term.

In more normal times, Piketty believes, r > g will drive ever-increasing concentration of wealth at the top — unless tax and other policy choices impose sufficient constraint on that concentration.

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Yes, I’m Still Here

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It’s now been five weeks since my last post. In the five plus years preceding that stretch, I wrote just over 750 posts, never going more than two weeks in between postings. Who would have predicted a few years back there would come a time that ole Thucky would have more visibility here than I? … Read more

Winds of War

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I stole the title from a friend’s Facebook post. I doubt he’ll mind. He and I had the identical reaction to Trump’s speech to CPAC on Friday, in which Trump declared that America is about to undergo the greatest military buildup in history. Military buildups have one and only one purpose: going to war. That’s … Read more

How Do We Best ‘Save the Poor’?

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The data is in: Shared growth, not top-heavy growth, helps the poor.

[cross-posted from Inequality.org]

Note to BfAZ readers: I love being right, which made this post especially fun. The new data not only debunk the argument of the Illinois professor in her NY Times piece, but also the rantings of ole Thuckenthal, who regularly proclaims the superiority of America’s economy over the French economy. It just ain’t so.

Two months ago, in Equality for Taxi Drivers and Surgeons Taxi Drivers, I challenged the logic of Illinois professor Deirdre McCloskey in her New York Times op-ed,  Growth, Not Forced Equality, Saves the Poor.

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