David Cay Johnston on Politics

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

"Our democracy is in very deep trouble. ...Donald Trump is not the disease. He is the symptom."

"Governments throughout history have been run by tyrants."

"There are always people who want a tyrant. Democracy requires work if it's going to work."

"government that can't tax ...is no government at all."

"The fundamental affect that's taking place... is that government has changed from focusing on nurturing and developing a stable middle class, to these other policies."

"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."

"axes are at the core of our democracy."

"This book tells you what has either not been in the news or been in it glancingly, about what they're doing to our government; and that effects your safety, your income, your future."

"Donald Trump is never going to resign... 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."

"lectric and gas utilities in more than twenty states have... quietly obtained government approval to make customers pay in advance for new or upgraded facilities. It is as if... everyone has loaned them the money at zero percent interest."

"The Haudenosaunee people, the People of the Longhouse, the ones we call the created a democracy. ...hey had the equivalent of state legislatures. ...nly men ran for office. Only women voted, and women could remove from office men who misbehaved, and they did."

"John Adams... wrote that his fear... of what would destroy America was a business aristocracy would arise. Instead of people being yeomen farmers who owned their own land, or workers who owned their own tools... workers would be mere wage earners, and... not being truly independent, would vote for the policies that benefit the business aristocracy, and we would lose both our liberties and our democracy... a good indicator of what's going on right now."

"The... is... fundamental to the American Revolution and it is taught the wrong way in American schools. ...There's a wonderful book called The Boston Tea Party by Professor ... where he... got the British records... and the American records. ...It was a protest against a ...a government tax favor to the politically connected friends of King George who owned this royal monopoly, The East India Company. They mismanaged it because... in a competitive environment managers who can't run the business are gotten rid of, or they go out of business. But in a monopoly you can mismanage for a long time, and the same thing with a and an, where there's a... scintilla of competition among a few firms. ...hey were going to go bankrupt because they had all this tea that they couldn't sell, and they were going to replace a market in Boston... 7 out of 10 cups of tea drunk in November and December of 1773 were Dutch tea, but under this law that was being protested, there would be a monopoly, and only British tea could be drunk. ...eople understood that ...would ...mean higher prices ...less competition ...If we have such a fundamental misunderstanding of how the country got started, then we're going to have fundamentally flawed policies that flow out of these myths."

"Democrats and Republicans alike have turned the tax system into a vehicle not just to finance government but to finance social change. For the last three decades, it... has been weighing down the already deep pockets of the super rich while just weighing down everyone else."

"We're subsidizing Tyco and through the burglar alarm subsidy... while starving our parks and recreation programs; and what do we get in the big cities because we've starved those programs? Youth gangs! There have always been gangs not like we have today... and it's because of government policy."

"This book is about the many ways that corporations extract from you... extra nickels—which add up to thousands of dollars. Many of the mechanisms require the government's cooperation; some... the result of seemingly disconnected sources; others are hidden in plain site. ...It's in the fine print."

"People have to get registered to vote. People have to be driven to the polls on election day... Go to a district where there might be change. Arrange in advance... Don't call people and ask them to go. Go get them! Take them to the polls. That's the only thing that matters at the end of the day, our votes."

"Mr. Reagan came along and said, "Are you better off? ...Government is the problem," and persuaded people who were faced with problems... We had two oil shocks, '73 and '79, we had long lines at gas stations. There were a few cases where we had shootings of people in line at gas stations. ...We had inflation that was scaring people ..."

"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 as a share of the economy are the same as they were back then. ...hat we've gotten instead is all this government debt."

"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 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."

"Congress lets business owners, investors and landlords play by one set of rules, which are filed with opportunities to hide income, fabricate deductions and reduce taxes. Congress requires wage earners to operate under another, much harsher set of rules in which every dollar of income... is reported to the government, and taxes are withheld... to make sure pay in full."

"The other old democracy... was in Athens. ...Aristotle said democracy means "to rule and to be ruled in turns"... because the system... was designed to ensure that nobody would... cease power. ...Different clans had to be together. You couldn't be segregated. ...very month a different group was in charge. ...t worked for 200 years. our Constitution is based... on the experience of Ancient Athens, of."

"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."

"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 consumer protections. They took away enforcement of the existing laws. They benefited this political donor class, who were pursuing their own self-interest."

"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..."

"ur Consitution... is designed to be slow and hard to change. It takes six years to get rid of all the scalawags in office today. ...t's designed to be conservative, and it has a very interesting backstop. ...The has a second purpose... to have an ultimate backstop if the people went for a zealot, or a crazy person, to be president of the United States. ...hat would vote conscious and say "No, the popular will here is wrong. This person will destroy our democracy."

"So when Trump came to the White House, the people he brought with him, Michael Flynn... Steve Bannon, brought with them this team... Team Trump... n the federal agencies, it's not just the incompetent, unqualified, anti- cabinet secretaries who matter. It's not just Scott Pruitt, who wants to destroy the EPA and Betsy DeVos whose completely unqualified. It's the people that came with them... political termites... loosed into the structure of our government, and they are damaging our government."

"The Trump administration deposited political termites throughout the structure of our government. Their task, in the words of Steve Bannon, is the "deconstruction of the administrative state." ...e means to undo the tax, trade, regulatory, and other means... he end game is... a government that looks first after the best-off... not those most in need of a helping hand in the form of a sound education, clean water, and other basics of a healthy society... These termites operate out of sight... to bully or scare scientists into leaving, remove from public access... public records... necessary to enforce environmental, worker safety, and other laws."