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.

From The First Forbes List to the Last…

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Based on a comparison of the 1918 Forbes list to the 2014 list, we’ve officially returned to Gilded Age levels of wealth concentration. I have a new post up at inequality.org, with almost the same title as this one, From the First Forbes Rich List to the Last. Click through if you have the time. … Read more

Easiest Prediction Ever

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The machinations of Doug MacEachern and Robert Robb at the Republic are beyond pathetic. You could see their bullshit endorsement of Ducey coming a mile away. I’m not gloating here, as a gazillion others made this call as well, on similar reasoning. Here’s my Facebook prediction from September 30th: Okay, the Republic has endorsed three … Read more

Is Earned Media On The Way Out?

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There are two types of media coverage in campaigns, earned media and paid media. Paid media is of course advertising. Earned media is the coverage a candidate doesn’t have to pay for, such as interviews, debate appearances, and the like. It’s “earned” because a candidate has to work for it. And, of course, it doesn’t hurt to be the candidate of a major party.

Paid media obviously is alive and well. Probably too alive and well for most of us.

But what’s happening with earned media? It used to be that candidates craved media attention. Forgoing an opportunity to be in front of a camera was anathema. These days, not so much.

On Real Time last week, Bill Maher noted that the target in their “Flip a District” campaign was hiding from the media, and the public. Here in Arizona, we see the same thing. Candidate after candidate is turning down debate invitations and interviews. At public forums, half or more of the candidates sometimes are absent. Journalists from major media outlets can’t get their calls returned.

What’s changed? Could we be headed to a day when candidates show their faces only on paid ads and at partisan events closed to outsiders?

I’m not sure, but here’s my take:

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The Road to Aristocracy

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The annual Forbes list of America’s 400 wealthiest individuals was released Monday. Our 400 plutocrats had another stellar year, increasing their wealth by a tidy 13.5% to a record $2.29 Trillion. As has been the case for all but a few of the past 35 years, they did better than the country as a whole. … Read more

An Awesomely Descriptive New Phrase

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My colleague at Institute for Policy Studies, Betsy Wood, has coined a new phrase, “siphon-up economics,” which describes perfectly our economic policies of the past 34 years. Hopefully, “siphon-up economics” will replace “trickle-down economics” and “supply-side economics” in the lexicon, as it far more accurately describes what conservative economic policy is all about. Here’s Betsy’s op-ed piece from today’s issue of OtherWords:

The Scourge of Siphon-Up Economics
Addressing inequality head-on will put our nation’s wealth back where it belongs — with all of us.
By Marjorie E. Wood

When the Census released the latest data on inequality, most mainstream media outlets shrugged it off.

That’s quite a contrast from earlier this year when inequality was all the rage. Reporters were scrambling to write about it. In January, President Barack Obama made it the focus of his State of the Union speech. And Thomas Piketty’s 700-page book about inequality shot to the top of Amazon’s bestseller list in the spring.

What do the new data say? The gulf between America’s richest and poorest is growing.

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