David Cay Johnston Quotes

[The] only determinant of your economic life in 18th century France was how well you picked your parents. ...The functional equivalent of what would happen if we repealed the occurred, in that all capital and all land (and this was essentially an agrarian society) were tied up. Either the Church or trusts controlled so much that there was no movement...

If... immortal, amoral and greed-driven people walked the earth, we would have to rewrite our laws governing property. ...[O]ur new class of immortals could just keep accumulating wealth and power forever. In time they would probably own every... asset on earth worth having. ...[That] immortal being is the modern corporation.

Donald has a degree on his office [wall] from Penn, an ivy league school in economics <nowiki>[</nowiki>]. He was given that degree, and I emphasize the verb "given" because he always said "Mexico is going to pay for the wall." ...[A]ll thinking people went "How are you going to make a sovereign nation pay for a wall they don't want?" "I have a plan!" Do you know what his plan was when he came into office? "I'm going to put a tariff on Mexican goods." It's a guy with an economics degree who doesn't know that a tariff... means we pay for the wall through higher prices? The man doesn't know anything.

[O]ne of the great geniuses of our Constitution was the recognition that the liberties of the people depended on a certain set of standards. being a crucial one, the ability to speak your mind, the ability to follow or not follow religion as you chose... [W]hen we put these in place, we had this flourishing society. It's not perfect. We've got lots of things wrong in our society. Government has problems... but there is no civilization, there is no liberty, without government.

[T]he Trump presidency is unlike anything that came before, a presidency built on open public contempt for Constitutional principles.

[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.

Donald Trump said "I'm going to drain the swamp." He comes here and immediately turns it into a federally protected wetland, a paradise for Wall Street.

[W]e have the highest percentage of children who go to bed hungry of any modern country. You wouldn't know from reading the news or watching TV that America has a hunger problem, that all across America we have communities, in the country, in the suburbs, in the city, where volunteers send home backpacks full of food for families on the weekend, because otherwise these kids would not eat.

and ... as leaders of <nowiki>[</nowiki>CREW]... describe Trump's conduct as a "flagrant abuse" of the Constitution for personal profit. ...Painter, the Bush ethics chief... is almost apoplectic at Trump's conduct and the failure of his fellow Republicans to speak up.

[T]he Democrats, who have not paid attention to their knitting for 40 years, while the Republicans have been building bench strength, passing laws to suppress votes, coming up with laws to throw out votes after they're cast, as we saw in Michigan. The Democrats have to run candidates who are viable. I was sent a news clip by a friend... a couple of interviews of people who want to run for office as Democrats... they were young and they were earnest and... then they got asked questions... [T]hey immediately fell apart because they didn't know anything. They were just like Donald Trump. ...You've got to find and develop real candidates.

This is the anti-education presidency.

[S]tate and local governments alone spend at least $70 billion a year of taxpayer's money to subsidize factories, office buildings [etc.]... $900 per year for a family of four.

And then we get a man who hasn't done a single day of public service in his life, and he has a rabid following. This is a man whose lawyers... in court two weeks ago said that "Yes... if he were to shoot someone on Fifth Avenue no law enforcement agency could investigate. He is immune."

A lot of people look at the world as they're born into it and assume, like Dr. Pangloss that it must needs be that this is the way that God intended the world to be. It is nowhere written down that we will have our liberties, that we will have the freedoms that we have come to know.

For almost three decades corporate profits have been growing one third faster that corporate taxes.