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.

In Defense of Stay at Home Progressives, Part 2

by

I received a comment to my post In Defense of Stay st Home Progressives that prompts a follow-up.

Here’s the pertinent part of the comment:

We can’t always get the best or sometimes even the second best. So you make the best of a weak lot and try to use the primaries to help get progressives in. One assumption made by more than a few, is to let the Dems lose big for a few cycles and then come back with real Dems. That fails to realize that more Federalist judges would be appointed to courts and even the SCOTUS and the things progressives want will never be attainable again. Right wing laws would be passed and codified and the plutocracy would be forever entrenched, unlike the 1880s when change was ultimately possible.

Read more

In Defense of Stay at Home Progressives

by

Memo to all those Democratic “pragmatists” who reflexively dismiss the attitudes of progressives who either (a) will reluctantly vote for a Blue Dog but otherwise do nothing to help or (b) will not participate at all, including on election day:

It’s not that simple.

The point of this post is not to be dismissive in return, but to invite you to consider the possibility that what you consider to be a logical slam dunk is something a bit more gray, and that the “stay at home progressives” are not irrational dreamers.

Read more

When Corporations Get Too Big to Tax

by

The drive to scrap the corporate income tax won’t stop at zero.

[Distributed via OtherWords.org]
Wouldn’t it be nice if the government paid you on Tax Day? I’m not referring to getting a tax refund because you overpaid the federal government or a safety-net benefit labeled as a tax refund under the “Earned Income Tax Credit” rules.

I mean an actual payment from the U.S. Treasury.

When Corporate America Gets Too Big to Tax, an OtherWords Cartoon by Khalil Bendib

Done laughing? Great. This really could happen, but with corporate-tax bills, not your personal 1040. Yes, we may very well see the day when Uncle Sam spends more money pandering to big companies than it receives from taxing them.

Read more

r > g: Paralleling Piketty

by

If we learned nothing else from Thomas Piketty’s masterpiece, it’s that r > g. So, I couldn’t resist this comparison: Thomas Piketty, May 2014 (Salon): So right now, what we see is that the top of the wealth distribution is rising at 6, 7 percent a year — more than three times faster than the … Read more

Sunday’s Must Read

by

Well, I’m clearly the least productive of the Blog for Arizona staff these days, even more so than usual. I’m still immersed in Thomas Piketty’s book, although nearing the end. And my friend Thucky has been a bit less prolific in his commenting these days, perhaps because he’s gone back to sleeping at 3 am, … Read more