David Cay Johnston Quotes

Consider the changes in income... the first full year after the Great Depression and the Great Recession... The economic rebound was widely shared in 1934, with strong income gains for the vast majority and a slight drop at the top, while in 2010 the opposite took place as the vast majority lost ground and those at the top scored big gains.

Trump has himself reduced his life philosophy to a single word—revenge. ...Repeatedly he has said in talks and in books that destroying the lives of people he considers disloyal gives him pleasure. That Trump does not recognize ethical limits on conduct... derives from his fundamental character, narcissism.

Whose society lasted 3,300 years? It was the [Egyptian] Pharaohs. ...They figured out through public works how to keep people busy and out of trouble, and every high-born Egyptian was taught... how far you can oppress people before they would strike back. ...[T]hey also learned one other lesson. You've all heard of the ?

[O]ur Consitution... is designed to be slow and hard to change. It takes six years to get rid of all the scalawags in office today. ...[I]t's designed to be conservative, and it has a very interesting backstop. ...The has a second purpose... to have an ultimate backstop if the people went for a zealot, or a crazy person, to be president of the United States. ...[T]hat [the elector] would vote [his] conscious and say "No, the popular will here is wrong. This person will destroy our democracy."

Revenge is the philosophy of dictators and mob bosses... used to keep others in line with threats of economic ruin, violence, or worse.

When this country was founded, there had only been 7 corporations... in the... old British colonial United States, at the time of the Declaration of Independence. Six of them were what today we would either call a charity or a utility. ...One corporation, created in the colony of New Haven, was set up solely to make profit. It was such a scandal they had to shut it down within a year and it took 10 years to clean up the mess. The Founders disliked and distrusted corporations. But they believed in collective bargaining, and I can prove that because in 1792 Congress passed the first significant labor law and subsidy law. It was to benefit the cod fishing industry. We got a quarter of our foreign earnings from cod and we were deeply in debt from... the Revolutionary War. So it was important we had foreign earnings. ...[T]o address ...harassment by the British Navy the cod fishing industry wanted a subsidy, and Thomas Jefferson ...ordered a study and concluded that those ships that only paid wages to their fishermen should be excluded. But if... the workers were paid partly in the share of the profits... then you got the subsidy, and 5/8 of the subsidy went to the workers and 3/8 to the company. ...[T]hat sounds a lot like collective bargaining.

Donald Trump has been involved with the Russians back to 1983. He has worked very hard to suppress a lawsuit about a quarter billion dollar tax fraud which he authorized. ...DCReport.org, the nonprofit news service that my friends and I started ...is in court trying to get access to some of the documents in this case that have been sealed, because Trump has been incredibly successful in hiding the record of his conduct.

In the past quarter century... new rules... have weakened and even destroyed consumer protections while increasing the power of the already powerful. ...[T]he rules affecting who wins and who loses economically have been quietly and subtly rewritten.

Whether you love or hate Ronald Reagan, he was a great leader. He really fundamentally changed America.

Democrats and Republicans alike have turned the tax system into a vehicle not just to finance government but to finance social change. For the last three decades, it... has been weighing down the already deep pockets of the super rich while just weighing down everyone else.

The most widely read literature in Western Civilization is Jane Austen and her stories are about these young women... They're looking at these young men... "Oh, Mr. Darcey has 10,000... Mr. So & so has 5,000," and what they're talking about is... the British finance system in the 1700s and 1800s where wealthy people loaned... large amounts to the crown and were paid interest. ...All the crown had to do then was raise enough taxes from the poor and the middle class, to the extent there was one, to pay the interest. ...[W]hat have we been doing since 1980. Ronald Reagan came in saying he wanted a balanced budget. We last had a balanced budget under Richard Nixon. We have seen budget deficits grow enormously over the years to the point where the federal debt, not adjusted to inflation, was just under $1 trillion when Ronald Reagan came into office, and by the time George Bush leaves, it will be $10 trillion. ...Over $400 billion a year is just going to pay interest on the national debt. That means it's money we don't have for higher education, for infrastructure improvements so we don't have have bridges collapse and kill people in Minnesota when they're commuting home from work. So we don't have pinch points that are costing us billions and billions of dollars because we can't efficiently move goods around the country. We don't have it for all sorts of things that would grease the wheels of commerce and make us wealthier.

Japan has mandatory unions. ...It's in their Constitution, and who wrote their Constitution? ...The staff of... General Douglas MacArthur, because he knew that if Japan had unions it would democratize the country, it would tend to equalize incomes, and it would help resist the bellicose tendencies of the aristocratic class in Japan. And it's worked brilliantly.

Where are the ministers? ... ...said ..."Donald denies it." Well, Eliot Spitzer denied it. ...Bill Clinton denied it. ...[Graham] goes... "Donald is a changed man from 10 years ago." ...That's a reasonable question to think... you know, was I different 10 years ago? ...I was. I had less grey hair.

Trump bought the Doral with $104.8 million he borrowed from ... infamous for laundering money for Russian oligarchs. ...When Trump took office, the Doral was under a foreclosure order. Trump, as he often does, refused to pay contractors in full. ...Most contractors just walk away when Trump refuses to pay... because Trump will spend far more to litigate than the amount in dispute to discourage contractors and small business owners he cheats from suing for what they are due.

[T]axes are at the core of our democracy.