David Cay Johnston Quotes

Martin Luther King Jr. said he had a dream that one day his four children would be judged by the content of their character, not by the color of their skin. ...Today we often value people less by their character than by the contents of their wallet. ...The pursuit of ever more financial zeros... has... produced a moral breakdown... twisting our culture and our values in ways that tear at the fabric of our society.

Inflation, combined with the end of real growth in wages beginning in 1973, created... "bracket creep" that moved people into higher tax brackets even if... real incomes were unchanged.

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.

Adolf Hitler had a really deep philosophy. ...It came out of a hundred years of German and Polish and Austrian and Russian and Belarus and Ukrainian philosophy about the "Demon Jews" and the Romanis and the "cripples"

[T]o the extent that people have said... "I don't care what the government's doing..." politicians fall under the influence of other people... in our age they have fallen heavily under the influence of their [political] donors. ...We have a government that is increasingly estranged from the needs of the people, and focused on the needs of the moneyed people and large corporations.

In 1990, I broke the story that, instead of being worth billions, as he'd claimed, Trump actually had a negative and escaped a chaotic collapse into personal bankruptcy only when the government took his side over the banks...

For five months, Trump's campaign manager was Paul Manafort, advisor to dictators and near dictators including a pro-Moscow regime in Ukraine that was ousted by a popular uprising.

Trump has worked hard to make sure few... know about his lifelong entanglements with a major cocaine trafficker [Joseph Weichselbaum].., with American and Russian mobsters and many mob associates, and with various con artists and swindlers.

Americans have a pretty good idea of the chaos and the palace intrigues in the Trump White House. Journalists are actually doing a much better job of covering what's going on in the White House than I anticipated, partly because, even though Donald Trump is all about loyalty to Donald, there are all sorts of people eager to leak, who are in there not as close allies... and who want to position themselves for the future with journalists.

People have to get registered to vote. People have to be driven to the polls on election day... Go to a district where there might be change. Arrange in advance... Don't call people and ask them to go. Go get them! Take them to the polls. That's the only thing that matters at the end of the day, our votes.

I have encountered I don't know how many people who have...written to me... about how we have the strongest economy in history. No we don't, and nobody who knows the numbers would say something like that, but you could easily get that impression... from watching just television news, and listening to the president repeatedly tell us what a strong economy we have, when it's just not true.

That hotel... in Trump organization filings had predicted would lose money in its first year, is making money hand over fist. ...They're taking in at the bar, $68,000 a night. ...If you want something from the Trump administration, what he made clear, is "You will pay me tribute." You'll sign up to join , where he doubled the admission price.

[L]aws in nineteen states... let companies pocket the state income taxes withheld from their workers' paychecks for up to twenty-five years. ...In many of these subsidy programs, no jobs are created.

While only a minority of people was taxed during World War II, the politicians got a taste of the huge revenues... by expanding the tax base. After the war... the income tax was steadily expanded until it applied to most Americans...

[W]e live in a society where... presidents and candidates for president of both parties are always saying "God Bless America" and "This is the greatest ever" and they're not talking about the real facts of what's going on.