David Cay Johnston on Time

"David Cay Johnston Recent and archived work for The New York Times"

"We're all interdependent. Don't think about exploiting and mining other people because we're all interdependent. ...You say that today and people say, "Oh, you're a socialist!"

"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."

"That's what I'm worried about... the tyrant next time."

"aws in nineteen states... let companies pocket the state income taxes withheld from their workers' paychecks for up to twenty-five years. ...In many of these subsidy programs, no jobs are created."

"has a marketing deal with, and Verizon has joint marketing deals with, Cox and Time Warner. This is not competition butization. The losers... are the consumers, who will pay higher prices for lower-quality service."

"Next time you go to a talk by me, because I'm sure I'll be back with one of my future books. Maybe the one I hope to have out next year, which is a whole new tax system that's simple and... you can't cheat under my system without committing a crime. Bring a young person."

"imiting liability... has also obscured a corporation's responsibility to function for the benefit of society. The greater good is an idea that is thousands of years old, but in the recent past corporations have been permitted to lose site of that... notion."

"Child poverty increased in this country since 1980, even though we have had divorce rates fall. We have hundreds of thousands of young people who don't go to college because they can't afford it. ...rom tax data, the average income of the bottom half of Americans is $15,000 per tax payer. ...It's right out of the IRS tables. Some people say it's unfair to use that because there's income that isn't counted, like Social Security payments, and it's taxpayers not households, but even if you go to households, the cost of going to state college now is about $10,000... If you go to household income, even at the typical median level, $50,000; how somebody making $50,000, with even two children, can afford $10,000 a year for college for kids is amazing. When you and I were kids college was paid for. It was free to us. Society paid for it because they were investing in the future. Now, we're putting road blocks in the way of the most valuable asset we have. We're subsidizing the owners of baseball teams and football teams, which is lots of fun, but it's trivia, and we're doing it, in part, by cutting money for this."

"Almost two cents of every dollar reported as losses one year by everyone in the United States, were reported by Donald Trump. ...He's a terrible business man. His business model is not to get an enterprise, to nurture it, to grow it, to make it more profitable over time. His business model is the same as a mob bust-out. ...queeze all the cash out... don't pay your vendors, try to cheat as best you can your employees, don't pay the bankers... Trump once said, "I borrowed money knowing I wouldn't pay it back," and then leave the carcass and go on to the next deal. ...Trump's business model is to rip off one person after another who gets involved with him, thinking he will make them wealthy, while he is destroying their wealth."

"When you and I were young and a company laid people off, you would see the president, not the CEO... in those days, say "...I'm gonna work for a dollar a year" or "I'm going to take no bonuses until everybody is rehired." Today it's... "Ooh, I fired 10,000 people. I'll get a bigger bonus!"

"The result? In the past 25 years, one American family in seven has sought refuge in federal bankruptcy court. Exhaustive research by Elizabeth Warren... and her associates... has proven that the vast majority of people seek refuge... after any two of three events combine: divorce, job loss, or major medical problems."

"But that's not what... effects your lives, your children's lives ... It is important that we understand what the Trump administration is doing. ...t's not Donald personally doing this. Donald's a lazy guy. He works about 4 hours a day. ...e spends one third of his time at his properties. It's the people he brought in."

"Consider the changes in income... the first full year after the Great Depression and the Great Recession... The economic rebound was widely shared in 1934, with strong income gains for the vast majority and a slight drop at the top, while in 2010 the opposite took place as the vast majority lost ground and those at the top scored big gains."

"That hotel... in Trump organization filings had predicted would lose money in its first year, is making money hand over fist. ...They're taking in at the bar, $68,000 a night. ...If you want something from the Trump administration, what he made clear, is "You will pay me tribute." You'll sign up to join, where he doubled the admission price."

"He says in 2015, "I have a tax plan here. The best tax experts in America have all been over it." ...I called and said "Where are the experts?" There are no experts. They didn't have anybody. Come April, he's been in office three months. He promised, day one, we're going to have a tax bill. They put out a 100 word tax plan... It was a shopping list for' clients."

"Over many years in paid public appearances and in books bearing his name... Trump rejected the idea of turning the other cheek, saying that those who do are "fools" and "idiots." This philosophy was ignored by the many pastors who endorsed Trump and accepted... that he is a Christian. ...evenge is explicitly rejected by Jesus and runs counter to the whole theme of the New Testament."

"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. ...ll societies have to operate from myths. You have to have a shorthand for your culture, but ours is getting disconnected from reality."

"What is Trump doing? Nothing. Japan signs a trade deal with the European Union last summer in Brussels. Donald Trump is 800 miles to the east in Poland. He's giving a speech where he talks about "Everyone adored me..." So while this important trade deal is going down, where's Donald Trump? ...ou put Japan together with Europe, and the RCEP, and this is not good for our future. This is very, very bad for our future."

"Back in 1996 I was the principle reporter at The New York Times on a huge series... that changed the way executive pay was reported. We showed how the head of had gotten a $100 million pay one year and he only paid taxes on about $2 Million... e had built a fortune of just shy of a billion dollars at that point, tax free... here were members of the board of directors of Coke that did not understand how much money they had paid him."

"If we do our jobs as citizens, we become informed, we insist on rational debate about real issues and we then get people to the polls, we can get a different Congress, we can get rid of this presidency and we can have a bright future. There's damage that will last forever, but the longer he's in office, the longer he is a clear and present danger to all the world. So please... read my book, get to the actual damage being done, and tell other people."

"This practice of borrowing is a practice that in the long run will make us less wealthy. The practice of spending money we don't have inherently, in the long run, has to make you less wealthy, unless you're spending it for things that add value to your society. So if you're borrowing to build... the Erie Canal, the Interstate Highway system, to educate young people so that their productive minds will make more value in the future, you're making an investment in the future. That's not what we're doing with our borrowing. We're... simply spending money we don't have today... transferring enormous amounts of money to big corporations and wealthy individuals."

"f Reaganism worked, if Bush's tax cuts worked, America today would be swimming in jobs. That's what we were promised. It would lead to all this investment and all these jobs. Instead, it's led to this enormous concentration of wealth among people who could never consume that much wealth, and who now increasingly are putting it into financial products, rather than investing it in ways that will grow the economy. ...e're socking it away ...American corporations, under a rule almost nobody knows about ...are limited in how much cash they can hold, unless they move it overseas. ...nce you move if overseas they can have ...unlimited amounts of cash, and what have we seen happen? ...Corporations have almost 3 times as much cash overseas as they have at home, and they then take that cash and buy US treasuries. So we pay big corporations to not pay their taxes. ...The interest they will earn from the treasury will exceed the value of the tax, and we will collect 40 cents on the dollar or less of the actual tax. ...Literally it has become a profit center ..."

"The most important period determining your lifetime health and emotional well being, and therefore you ability to get along, is from conception to about the first 6 months of your life. We pay very little attention to that. We give women in this country 6 weeks of disability, and they may use several other at the end of their pregnancy, so little babies... are not getting enough nurturing. In some of the European countries you are required to take a year off, and it's a violation of the law... to hold a job when you have a small child, because these societies recognize that we have a long-term interest. So just as we're using up our infrastructure by not fixing up roads and bridges and dams and pipelines, we are also stealing from the future by not nurturing and providing proper care for small children. ...here will be a price, and it will be very high."

"lot of people have looked around after 28 years, from when they were promised all these things by Ronald Reagan... realized that for the bottom 90% of Americans incomes are unchanged... even though the country is more than twice as wealthy in real terms, and productivity per capita is up 70%; for every dollar the economy put out back then, per person, in real terms, it puts our $1.70 today. And they've said, "Where's the beef?" ...hat disconnect is ...opening up an opportunity to get people to see what the government has done that's contrary to their interests, because Adam Smith said "Any policy that benefits the majority of the people must be a good thing for the society."

"A few years after the war ended, took on a partner... Willie Tomasello. When cash was short, Tomasello was able to provide Trump with operating capital on short notice. Tomasello also saw to it that there was no trouble from the unions... The New York State Organized Task Force identified Tomasello as an associate of the Genovese and Gambino Mafia families... turned to an organized crime associate as his long time partner... Decades later, Donald Trump would also do business with the heads of the same families, though at a remove, developing numerous business connections with an assortment of criminals, from con artists and a major drug trafficker to the heads of the two largest Mafia families in New York City..."

"From 1945 to 1980 we had a bipartisan consensus in this country about nurturing and developing the middle class. ...There were plenty of fights back and forth, but both sides of the aisle agreed that government should be building up the majority of the people to create a better, wealthier society. We had the, probably the smartest single thing government's done in modern times. ...We had the built, although it was built at the urging of the Pentagon so that we could move material around if we had to have productivity for a war. We invested in all sorts of things, basic science education, we had 30 year mortgages developed..."

"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. ...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. ...hat sounds a lot like collective bargaining."

"wo income households... Lots and lots of women are out there working at jobs that pay minimum wage or $8 an hour. ...he result of the falling wage structure in this country is that the average family with children does 1,000 hours more paid labor today than it did back in the early '70s. ...That's working essentially half of the year. ...arried women with children have often worked throughout history. A Christmas job, a Saturday job. They had what we used to call pin money, but they were not fundamental bread winners, and there are costs associated with this. We have costs for daycare"