David Cay Johnston on Education

"Let's go to the student loan industry. ...What is the Trump administration doing? "We're going to address the student loan problem." So brings in... executives from the companies that made the student loans. ...This is building a new hen house designed by the fox!"

"e've had this tremendous weakening of the news media, so that large federal agencies... have no beat reporters... covering them. We have city councils and school boards all across America that get no coverage... and this is terrific for those people who are getting rich by exploiting the rules of the system for their benefit; and you're not hearing about that."

"There's a big attack going on in this country on public education. One of the Koch brothers... publicly advocated ending public education, because that's socialism. ...n Wisconsin we saw people call kindergarten teachers thugs. Something I would never have imagined when I was young... t's because we've gone through a fundamental change. We've been living under Reaganism now since 1981, and in Reaganism we worship money, and our measure of the country is money."

"One of the stories that I tell in Free Lunch when I talk about the hedge fund business in the United States and the hedge fund managers who pay taxes at the same rate as janitors... a 15% tax rate on their incomes... The average hedge fund manager in 2006, remember the hedge fund managers keep telling us that if you raise our taxes the whole economy be negatively affected, said that it was not fair to have them pay more than a 15% rate. Of course, school teachers and reporters pay 25% or 31%. Well-to-do Americans pay 35% and... the top hedge fund manager's average income was only $11 million... a week! But they can't afford the taxes."