David Cay Johnston Quotes

Lost... was the crucial fact that the federal government had established an underlying policy to make... services available to all at reasonable prices.

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.

Think about someone who's like Donald Trump in that he has... charisma... You've got to give it to Donald, he's a great con man. He's got these audiences wrapped around his finger. People who believe literally... He looks up to the sky. He implies that he's God. Did you see any pastors or rabbis or imams saying that's sacrilegious?

Donald Trump is never going to resign... [H]is ego is never going to let him resign. He will not be moved against by the Republicans... They've made their bed with him. They're excusing everything he does.

Steve Bannon put it best. Steve Bannon said "I'm a Lennonist" that is, I'm someone who wants to destroy the existing order. Many of these people, although they... wouldn't put in these terms, hate the United States of America. ...They hate the fact that there are people of color... that there are people of a different religion in this country, that there are people who are not interested in worshiping the rich and trying to get rich, and certainly don't want to be taxed to subsidize the rich.

One of the things that changed was [that] the institutions that supported working people have been decimated. ...[T]he Democrats, the party of the working people, played a role in this. They allowed the weakening... of unions. They bought the argument that unions are bad for companies.

Almost two cents of every dollar reported as losses one year by everyone in the United States, were reported by Donald Trump. ...He's a terrible business man. His business model is not to get an enterprise, to nurture it, to grow it, to make it more profitable over time. His business model is the same as a mob bust-out. ...[S]queeze all the cash out... don't pay your vendors, try to cheat as best you can your employees, don't pay the bankers... Trump once said, "I borrowed money knowing I wouldn't pay it back," and then leave the carcass and go on to the next deal. ...Trump's business model is to rip off one person after another who gets involved with him, thinking he will make them wealthy, while he is destroying their wealth.

[T]he rules we've set in our society are redistributing incomes up. Our national myth is that we have this socialism policy that redistributes down. The reality of the data is that we are redistributing up, and... we don't have trickle-down economics... we have Amazon [river] up.

To the addicted, money is like cocaine: Too much is never enough.

Economists have a term for situations in which someone gets rewards but has little or no incentive to avoid risk: a . ...Those who occupy the executive suite and gamble millions of dollars on the lives of others are rarely seen as engaged in morally hazardous conduct. Yet reward without risk is a form of moral hazard that blinds us to the consequences of our acts.

In 2006 the trade deficit with China reached $232 billion. ...more than $60 per month for every man, woman and child in America. ...In 2004 when the trade deficit... was $161 billion, it was... more than the $126 billion of income taxes paid by the bottom 75% of Americans.

Rather than building the economy for all of us, we are mining the bottom to benefit the top.

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

A government that takes 90 cents out of each dollar above a threshold, as... in the Eisenhower years, is deciding to limit the wealth that people can accumulate... Likewise, a government that taxes the poor on their first dollar of wages, as the United States does with the Social Security and Medicare taxes, is deciding to limit or eliminate the ability of those at the bottom... to save... and improve their lot in life.

In 2006... China, Japan, Canada, and Mexico—accounted for 60 percent of our worldwide trade deficit of $764 billion.