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.

Equality for Taxi Drivers and Surgeons?

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[cross-posted from Inequality.org]

Those who defend extreme inequality by arguing against complete equality are doing their best to divert our attention from the questions that matter.

By Bob Lord

It never fails. Every opinion piece purporting to counter the voices opposing today’s extreme inequality employs the same sleight of hand: Justify economic inequality in the abstract, without commenting on the actual level of inequality we face.

The latest example appeared in this past Sunday’s New York Times. In Growth, Not Forced Equality, Saves the Poor, University of Illinois professor Deirdre McCloskey can’t even get past the title without swerving into an argument against Soviet-style communism.

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Finland: Saving Capitalism From Itself?

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“Capitalism,” as we know it, which really is shorthand for the existing political economic system in the West, is on a collision course. Left to itself, the system drives more and more wealth and income to the top. Already, over 50% of global wealth is held by the top one percent, and about 50% of that by the top one-tenth of one percent. Of course, as wealth and income continue to concentrate, the system itself becomes less stable. We see that in recent elections. Across the West, right-wing populists are gaining traction, while political parties that supposedly advocate for the working class openly cavort with their wealthy benefactors. If this doesn’t frighten you, you’re not paying sufficient attention.

Driving this development is a perversion over recent decades in the impact of technological advances on our society. Technology’s role should be to make all our lives better. For centuries, it worked that way. In the first 60 years of the 20th century, for example, technology drove the American work week down from 60 hours to 40 and took children out of the workplace.

Technological advances, however, don’t necessarily benefit us.

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Choice for Dem Loyalists: Eat Crow and Change or Drink Kool-Aid and Stagnate

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The explanations for Clinton’s loss by Dem loyalists abound. It’s the third-party voters, the no shows, the misogyny, the fake news, the false equivalency pushed by the mainstream media, or some combination of those factors that swung the election in the wrong direction.

I read an excellent piece in Raw Story about the Christian right: The dark rigidity of fundamentalist rural America: a view from the inside. It is an absolutely searing critique of rural America, well worth the read. But it doesn’t in the least explain the election results. Those people vote that way in every election. Yet Obama was able to overcome that problem, while Clinton couldn’t. And the demographic winds over the last few years blew in Clinton’s favor. Those rural voters posed less of a problem to her than they did to Obama.

When you look closely, it’s hard to deny what really happened, and the music  Dem loyalists simply do not want to face. The Dem loyalist with whose thinking I’m most familiar is our own BlueMeanie. So, I’ll use BlueMeanie, who I’ll refer to as Blue for short, for purposes of analysis.

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Chickens Coming Home to Roost? A New Look at an Old Post

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I’m closing in on five years writing here at BfAZ. So I was curious. What was I saying back then and does it make any sense today? I’m sure there were later posts that have no relevance today (and probably never did), but my first substantive post, Atlas Shrugged Upside Down,  may be more timely now than when I wrote it. Reading that post makes me wonder if the chickens are coming home to roost.

At the time I wrote Atlas Shrugged Upside Down, I’d just forced myself to read Atlas Shrugged, which I’d somehow managed to avoid while in high school. But I wanted to understand better the philosophy to which so many right wingers subscribed. So I endured Rand’s thousand page gem.

Five years ago, you may recall, Occupy had just happened and reducing extreme economic inequality finally was gaining traction as an issue.

A thought, which became the subject of the post, occurred to me:

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Great Hamburger Hunt Ends With a Surprise Winner

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Sorry, but I need to put politics aside for a special report.

A few months ago, I had a conversation with our two youngest, Bennet and Seth, about Whataburger restaurants and how they were disappearing. We decided it would be a good idea to go to one before they were completely gone (It turns out they’re nowhere near gone and actually are still selling franchises).

We did, and it evolved into the Great Hamburger Hunt (I never was able to pull off the vegetarian thing completely, but I have cut back).  In order to be considered, there had to be more than one of a restaurant. Specifically excluded were chains like McDonalds, Burger King, and Jack in the Box, because we knew they couldn’t win and none of us wanted to die an early death.

The initial list of competitors turned out to be:

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