David Cay Johnston

“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.”

“[O]ne of the fundamental changes that's taken place is more and more coverage of controversies instead of issues.”

“I remember reading a story... in one of the biggest papers in the country about the county budget in the dominant area of marketing for that newspaper... It consisted of the 3 county commissioners... yelling at each other over the budget, and it had a single mention of the budget will be "x" dollars. It didn't tell me how much of my property taxes go up, are they spending more on the sheriff and less on schools or are they going to fix the potholes. None of the substance was there.”

“When I became a reporter in the 60s in California, one of the very first lessons I learned was, your supposed to be watchdogging the government.... looking out for the taxpayers. If the politicians want to spend more money, why? What's it for? Why am I going to give up more of my sustenance to the government? If the government needs it, let's hear the case for it. ...[N]ow we have city councils in big cities in the United States where no reporter goes for months at a time to the meetings; where the city budget doesn't get covered at all.”

“Except for a handful of people, Peter Gosselin at the Los Angeles Times who's done some big series, and a few other reporters here and there, now and then, why is it that this issue of income redistribution and government taking from the many and giving to the few is not being reported widely. You are not reading about it in many, many, many newspapers around the country. I would think it would be one of the major things.”

“[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.”

“{{w|Enron}}, which did not pay taxes (I broke that story... about 7 or 8 years ago), owned {{w|Portland General Electric}}... and people paid close to $1 billion in their electric rates to cover its taxes. Money that never got to the government... by tax shelters and [through] other devices. When I wrote a story on this on the front page of The New York Times, the {{w|Edison Electric Institute}} wrote a letter... they didn't say this wasn't true. They just said we're doing what the law allows.”

“As taxpayers we gave one of Warren Buffet's companies, in 2006, an interest-free loan of $665 million dollars, and he only has to pay half of it back 28 years from now. ...Imagine ...you bought a house in 1980 at the price in 1980. Up until now [2009] you haven't made any payments on the house, and this year you have to pay half in the... dollars you agreed to back then, no adjustment for inflation. Do you think that alone might make you a wealthy man?”

“[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 {{w|estate tax in the United States}} 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...”

“[A] lot of what I've been writing about in Free Lunch and... Perfectly Legal and the 13 years of stories I've been doing in The New York Times are about... a growing disconnect between our political and cultural mythology, and how the economy actually works. ...[A]ll societies have to operate from myths. You have to have a shorthand for your culture, but ours is getting disconnected from reality.”

“So all of the things we were promised, most... haven't happened. There have been some good things. Airfares have fallen... There have been some benefits. It is not black and white, but my focus is on these areas where we now have massive transfers of wealth and income from those with less, to the politically connected few. Billions and billions of dollars being handed up the ladder.”

“I don't have any problem with people pursuing their own self-interest. It's just [that] there has not been a push-back from the rest of society, as we have seen unions, which helped push back, decline; and other areas where there was push-back, decline. The... churches were involved with this, and we've seen them decline.”

“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 {{w|Enron}} 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.”

“[A]ssuming that all the... interest on the federal debt is paid, just from the individual income tax, all the income taxes that you pay from January through the end of April, just go to pay interest on the national debt; and since 86% of federal tax revenues come from labor (and 14% from capital); that means that we explicitly have a policy now to tax labor [in order] to transfer [that revenue] to [privately held] capital.”

“[W]hat were we promised in 1980 when Ronald Reagan asked his famous question, "Are you better off now than you were 4 years ago?" ...I'm here asking the question, "Are you better off than you were in 1980?" He said we'll have less taxes. ...Taxes [and government spending] as a share of the economy are the same as they were back then. ...[W]hat we've gotten instead is all this government debt.”

“Balzac said 200 years ago that "behind every great fortune lies a crime," but we know how to create wealth now: the Industrial Revolution created wealth, the {{w|Information revolution}} and our ability to manipulate cyberspace, and to develop concepts and structures in mathematics, and elsewhere. We can create real wealth. So, per say, being wealthy is now not the result of taking from those with less; and yet this historic problem has come roaring back... under the guise of conservatism.”

“I want to do things that are beyond the scope of the daily newspaper, as good as it is and as important as it is... beyond the scope of even a great newspaper like The New York Times.”

“[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.”

“[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. {{w|Habeas corpus}} 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.”

“Prior to our Constitutional Bill of Rights... the historic problem for the inconvenient individual was predation by the state. If the king doesn't like you, throw him in {{w|Château d'If}}, [if] the king wants your daughter when she's a virgin and you don't want to hand her over, cut the guy's throat.”