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.

About Those Apples

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Bad apples, that is. I’ve had it “splained” enough times that I’ve lost count how police brutality in America is just a problem with a “few bad apples.” Of course, the “few bad apples splainers” are always the first to condemn the Black community for how it reacts to these “few bad apples.” So I wonder: … Read more

Bridging the Gap Between the Meanie and Dang

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One of our conservative commenters, whom I nicknamed “Dang” back when I thought he/she might be the same person as our friend Thucky (I was wrong), made what I thought was a particularly apt comment to a recent BlueMeanie post on the May jobs report.

The Meanie reported accurately about the job creation in May (280,000), which was impressive, and the consistency of the jobs recovery, also impressive, if you focus on the number of jobs. The Meanie pointed to a possible weakness in productivity growth, a point to which I’ll return below, and other factors in trying to reconcile the robust job growth with the less than stellar economic growth.

Dang had what on the surface would be an entirely different way of reconciling the job growth with overall economic strength. Here’s Dang’s comment:

No administration’s policies have created more twenty hour per week jobs than the current one.

I don’t agree with Dang’s attribution to this administration’s policies, but put that aside. The comment otherwise is spot-on. A lot of the newly created jobs have been what we insist on describing as “part-time” jobs.

And that’s where I think the Meanie’s chest-thumping about Obama’s job creation and Dang’s harrumphing about supposedly shortened work weeks can be reconciled.

If you’re still interested, follow me after the jump.

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Enough With the “Oops” Snark Already

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The American media won’t hesitate to destroy a political career over a bad “moment.” The American public, of course, joins in with glee. I remember the “Dean scream” with disdain. Not disdain directed at Howard Dean, but at the morons in the media who used the so-called scream to savage his campaign. With a media … Read more

Productivity: Where Marx Nailed it on Capitalism

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Newsflash: Education (or the lack of it) is not why American wages are stagnant or falling.

The real explanation for stagnant or falling wages lies in productivity gains, and where those gains are flowing. Consider this report from Zack’s research: Darden to Install Ziosk Tablets at all Olive Garden Units in US:

Italian restaurant, Olive Garden, has announced that it has entered into a deal with Dallas-based Ziosk LLC to introduce tabletop tablets in all its U.S. restaurants. Ziosk is the manufacturer of ordering, entertainment and pay-at-the-table tablet. The company expects to install these tablets at all its 800-plus U.S. locations before 2015-end.

[snip]

The Ziosk 7-inch touchscreen tablets, working on Android technology, will offer facilities such as choosing from the company’s wide menu, ordering drinks, appetizers and desserts, and help guests to pay the bill easily.

Call me crazy, but I see millions of server jobs in restaurants about to go “poof.” And the servers who remain will perform such minimal service per table that they will no longer be considered tip-worthy.

And, no, Darden is not some outlier:

In fact, it is these benefits that have prompted Brinker International Inc.’s to install these tablets at its Chili’s location in the U.S. Another restaurateur, DineEquity, Inc., has also introduced Ziosk devices at its Applebee’s Neighborhood Grill and Bar restaurants.

What does this have to do with Marx? Plenty.

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150 Years Later, Still Sticking It to Native Americans

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Put this one in the category of “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” Or perhaps “Yes, Jeff Flake and John McCain are racist shills for the mining industry.”

It’s been just over 152 years since the Bear River Massacre. Bear River, I was surprised to learn, was the worst massacre of Native Americans to take place. I’d always thought that distinction went to Wounded Knee.

That was then. This is now, from Friday’s NY Times: Selling Off Apache Holy Land, by Lydia Millet. The focus of my daily reading is admittedly not Arizona-centric, but this one could not have been very widely reported for me to have missed it entirely. Millet explains in her piece how Flake and McCain, at the behest of their foreign-owned  corporate patron, Resolution Copper Mining, slipped a last-minute amendment into the defense authorization bill approving the transfer to Resolution Copper of ground sacred to the San Carlos Apache tribe.

McCain and Flake’s action was sleazy, even by Congressional standards, according to Millet:

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