David Cay Johnston Quotes

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

Trump is the first president to pose numerous questions about whether he is receiving income from foreign governments, which the Framers felt was inherently corrupting. He is also the first to present the issue of profiting from spending by federal, state, and local governments with payments that the Framers denied... How these cases are resolved will likely have an enormous influence on whether the American Republic endures...

Everything has rules... The rules that we set really determines who benefits and who bears the burden. ...[W]e have all of these policies ...that largely determine what's happening. ...[I]n America... we live in a society... where coming out of the Great Recession, a third [33%] of all increased income through 2012 went to the top 16,000 households, that's the 1% of the 1% [1 out of 10,000], 95% of that income went to the top 1%, and the bottom 90 per cent's income actually fell... to the level of 1966... [T]hat happened because the government rules, in many ways, from who gets access to quality education, to who gets proper health care, to incarceration policies, are shaping what's happening to our society.

One of the criticisms I've... gotten is "You're a reporter, what are you doing writing with a moral tone?" ...[Y]es, this is a book about political culture and morality. I cite , the Bible and as moral authorities in this book. ...Andrew Mellon says that people are more important than capital and people have to be thought of first, not capital... that's not our culture today. All throughout the Bible, the most frequently denounced evil is taking from the poor to give to the rich. The Bible tells us in both books that your society will come to ruin if you do this.

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.

So we didn't get less government... that we were promised. Next we were told we should have deregulation. There's no such thing as deregulation. Everything has rules. ...What we got were new regulations... written by and the railroads and the banks, and they eliminated [or reduced] consumer protections. They took away enforcement of the existing laws. They benefited this political donor class, who were pursuing their own self-interest.

This growing concentration of income at the top... resembles the distribution of income found in three other major countries: Brasil, Mexico, and Russia. ...They all have growing, and seemingly intractable, poverty at the bottom. ...These four countries are also societies in which adults have the right to vote, but real political power is wielded by a relatively narrow, and rich, segment of the population.

[T]hey have stopped posting notices of worker deaths. About 4800 people a year die on the job, and some... are just accidents nobody could have predicted. ...But many of them are the result of the fact that... While... most employers try, or do a good job, there are some [that] just don't care. ...[T]ime after time, they have workers who are unnecessarily maimed or killed. The records of those aren't there any more. They're not putting them up. They're fighting giving away the statistical information that we need to understand what they're doing, and the Labor Department's actions in this area are far from unique.

[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.

[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.

[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.

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.

The s... go to the very nature of... America and whether we are a nation of laws... whether elected office is for public service or it permits profiteering.

Trump has... lived a life of thumbing his nose at conventions and law enforcement, learning... from his father, Fred, whose business partner was an associate of the Gambino and Genovese crime families. He has long been in deep with mobsters, domestic and foreign, along with corrupt union bosses and assorted swindlers. Trump even spent years deeply entangled with a major international drug trafficker who, like many of the others, enjoyed their mutually lucrative arrangements.

Since the imperfect rules of the marketplace actually reward dangerous risk taking, the only thing that could prevent this lethal gamble is effective government regulation.