David Cay Johnston Quotes

[T]he Internal Revenue Service in 2003 released its first public analysis of tax returns filed by the 400 highest income Americans... from 1992 to 2000. ...the federal income tax burden on Americans overall rose by 18 percent, it fell by 16 percent for the top 400, whose incomes soared.

The hiring of Manafort and others, specifically , a Russian-born real estate mogul with mob ties whose 2015 emails indicate that he hoped to help secure both a Moscow-based real estate deal and the American presidency for Trump—showed a disturbing pattern of associations with those around Vladimir Putin, head of the in Moscow...

[P]residents of companies have gone from apologizing when they had to lay off workers to boasting of the riches... obtained through mass firings. ...[I]nvestors ...owe their wealth ...to buying companies in deals that required destroying lives and careers

Trump is desperate for others to fill the void inside himself. He has a sad need for attention and, preferably, public adoration.

[B]ecause labor returns have gone down there's not enough ... to buy goods and services. ...The next thought should be ...capitalists will change because people have to buy their products. No, if your a global level capitalist, it doesn't matter. As long as there aren't riots in the streets, you can sell your goods in other countries.

Trump never faced tough questions as a candidate where he could not walk away or give nonsense answers without repeated follow-up. This is a serious problem for the future of American democracy in the television era, when appearances matter more than reality.

Many journalists rely for expert quotes on a dozen well-financed nonprofits that exist in Washington to promote policies that primarily benefit their rich donors.

I have this vague recollection of Republican leaders talking about their concerns about immorality, especially women and wanting to make sure we can't have access to things like birth control... and talking about family values. So out comes the Wall Street Journal on the playmate of the year who got paid $150 grand to not talk, and now the porn star and, trust me, to quote Donald, "Believe me..." there's more like this out there. Where are the moralists about Donald Trump's behavior? ...His conduct is outrageous.

No serious coverage of taxes is possible without reading the journal Tax Notes published by , a nonprofit enterprise whose beneficiaries include reporters.

[W]hat's happened in our society is we have seen this experiment, this crazy idea of self-governance which had very few antecedents, atrophy.

We decided in 1980 to go down a different path when we elected Ronald Reagan. We have gotten the results that Mr. Reagan said, if you listen to him carefully in 1980, we would get, which is that those people that are wealth holders would realize the income from that wealth, and they have. Their actual tax rates, for people at the very top, are 60% lower than what they paid in the 1960s. But at the same time, by getting rid of unions... by having these "free trade deals," which are really deals to drive down the cost of labor; we have driven down the wages and the salaries of the vast majority of Americans... We have also weakened these environmental laws... that were pretty good. So we've put in place a whole mechanism in which we favor profit over labor. ...When you look at the data you can see it ...Returns to labor in the Federal Reserve data go [down with time] and returns to capital have been rising, and since 2009 it's like looking at one of those jet fighters going straight up.

The ... is... fundamental to the American Revolution and it is taught the wrong way in American schools. ...There's a wonderful book called The Boston Tea Party by Professor [Labaree]... where he... got the British records... and the American records. ...It was a protest against a ...a government tax favor to the politically connected friends of King George who owned this royal monopoly, The East India Company. They mismanaged it because... in a competitive environment managers who can't run the business are gotten rid of, or they go out of business. But in a monopoly you can mismanage for a long time, and the same thing with a and an , where there's a... scintilla of competition among a few firms. ...[T]hey were going to go bankrupt because they had all this tea that they couldn't sell, and they were going to replace a market in Boston... 7 out of 10 cups of tea drunk in November and December of 1773 were Dutch tea, but under this law that was being protested, there would be a monopoly, and only British tea could be drunk. ...[P]eople understood that ...would ...mean higher prices ...less competition ...If we have such a fundamental misunderstanding of how the country got started, then we're going to have fundamentally flawed policies that flow out of these myths.

Many of those who believe in Trump come from the 90 percent whose economic fortunes have dwindled over that last half century... [P]olicies embraced by both parties ignored their plight or made it worse.

Just as there is an underground economy of gardeners and handymen and petty merchants who get paid in cash and pay little or no taxes, there is also an underground economy among the super rich that lets them understate their true income and overstate their tax deductions.

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.