Investigative Journalists

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

"People don't know... They... are so fascinated by what's going on in the White House, they're not paying attention to what matters. ...[T]he reason I hope every single one of you reads my book (and if you can't afford to buy the book, it's in the library...) is that people need to know this or we will not get change."

"Where are the ministers? ... ...said ..."Donald denies it." Well, Eliot Spitzer denied it. ...Bill Clinton denied it. ...[Graham] goes... "Donald is a changed man from 10 years ago." ...That's a reasonable question to think... you know, was I different 10 years ago? ...I was. I had less grey hair."

"What matters is that we get a new Congress. Donald Trump ran for president based on the economic policies (just the economics, not the racism) that was in my trilogy on the American economy: Perfectly Legal, Free Lunch and The Fine Print. If you know that uses your tax dollars to build its stores and GE taxes its workers in Ohio to build factories, you know that because of my work; and it's now widespread... even if most people have forgotten I'm the guy brought all that to the fore years ago."

"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 ..."

"I don't think Mr. Reagan intended what happened. ...Mr. Reagan had a clearly defined set of values, but what we got was not conservative. What we got were radical changes that have... turned out to work to our detriment."

"Where are the moralists who scream about drugs and say nothing about what I describe... Donald's deep entanglement with a major international cocaine trafficker [Joseph Weichselbaum], and things he did that make no sense whatsoever, unless they were in business together, in which case everything he did makes perfect sense. Where are these people?"

"The super rich... largely control what the government knows about their incomes. And their friends in Congress have slashed budgets for inspecting the tax returns..."

"I said back in 2012, a year when the average income of the bottom 90% of Americans was lower, adjusted for inflation... than in 1967... that if you ran for president on the economics in my books you would win, because it champions the 90%, in fact it champions... the 99.5%; and that's what Donald did, and I know he watched me on television because he talked to other people about it, who told me..."

"The big banks, car makers, insurers and a host of Canadian, Chinese, European and Japanese companies all get to profit by pocketing the taxes withheld from American workers' paychecks."

"[B]usiness has been regulated throughout history. ...[I]n the past four decades, we have forgotten the tried and tested (and therefore profoundly conservative) principles of business developed over thousands of years. ...[O]ur wealth... well being and... freedom are being diminished daily."

"[T]axes are at the core of our democracy."

"Donald Trump said "I'm going to drain the swamp." He comes here and immediately turns it into a federally protected wetland, a paradise for Wall Street."

"In every place where there is no real tax system, such as Honduras or Afghanistan, there is no widespread wealth."

"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."

"[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."

"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. ...[S]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 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."

"Many of those who believe in Trump come from the 90 percent whose economic fortunes have dwindled over that last half century... [P]olicies embraced by both parties ignored their plight or made it worse."

"Donald has a degree on his office [wall] from Penn, an ivy league school in economics []. He was given that degree, and I emphasize the verb "given" because he always said "Mexico is going to pay for the wall." ...[A]ll thinking people went "How are you going to make a sovereign nation pay for a wall they don't want?" "I have a plan!" Do you know what his plan was when he came into office? "I'm going to put a tariff on Mexican goods." It's a guy with an economics degree who doesn't know that a tariff... means we pay for the wall through higher prices? The man doesn't know anything."

"He appoints as his commerce secretary one of leading s in America, Wilbur Ross, whose specialty is seizing a company that's run out of cash, recapitalizing it. You don't pay the bills you owe... (something that Donald Trump never heard of). You borrow new money (something Donald Trump certainly has heard of) then you squeeze the borrowed money out and put it in your own pocket, and you turn the zombie [company] loose until it dies."

"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."

"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."

"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..." (That's because the right-wing government of Poland used police to make sure that only Trump supporters... got in, that protestors were kept blocks away...) So while this important trade deal is going down, where's Donald Trump? ...[Y]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."

"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."

"Wilbur Ross goes with Donald Trump to , where Donald Trump praises the Saudis for leading the fight against terrorism. You know who the biggest funders of terrorism in the world are? He attacks ... an ally of the US that allows us to have our most important military base there. ...Wilbur Ross comes back from this trip, he goes on CNBC and he says, "...The Saudi people love us. ...There wasn't a single demonstrator, anywhere..." and Becky Quick ...says "...It's against the law to protest there. They arrest people. They whip them"..."

"Donald Trump came into office and killed the . ...[T]hat partnership had serious flaws. It was written in secret, by corporate lobbyists and by lawyers involved in the trade business. It was so secretive that when my congresswoman, , having seen what I wrote, wanted to read what was in there... she said "Yea, it's all written... in language that doesn't mean anything to me," and Louise has a PhD in microbiology. ...It's written in the language of people in the trade, not to be understood by mere mortals."

"We needed to fix the TPP, but Donald killed it, and did nothing to replace it. ...That creates a vacuum, and into that vacuum stepped president Xi. The RCEP is the led by Beijing. It's 15 countries (not us, just as TPP didn't include China)... plus India. ...[W]hen I was in Australia... I was astonished... They were all saying that Australia is going to have to reorient its trade policies towards Beijing, because there is no American leadership."

", which did not pay taxes (I broke that story... about 7 or 8 years ago), owned ... 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 wrote a letter... they didn't say this wasn't true. They just said we're doing what the law allows."

"The way that the Trump administration is cutting regulations... It's just "Go ahead and pollute. Take the toxic residue from burning coal, and instead of drying it out and putting it in a place where it's unlikely to cause harm, continue to put it into slurries and then toxic ponds next to rivers where we get drinking water." That's not benefiting us. That's simply jacking up the profits of these companies, which by the way, get paid rates under rate regulation, to pay for these costs of cleaning up their mess."

"[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."

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

"[O]ne of the purposes of the was to contain China. ...China is very expansionist. ...[T]hey're building in the Spratly Islands these artificial islands and saying "You can't fly airplanes over here or run ships through here, especially not military ships." China believes that it's the country of the future, and if you drive on their highways... they put the Autobahn to shame, which puts our Interstates to shame... They are... like the Catholic Church in terms of their thinking, "We're here forever.""

"When Donald Trump took the oath of office "to faithfully execute the laws" and to be "loyal to the United States of America", he then got in a motorcade to go to the White House. There's a TV camera... in the truck... that looks square down the middle ...The presidential limousine... stopped... the family got out... they spent two minutes walking around... in front of the Trump International Hotel, whose lease says "no federal employee can be involved in that lease" and... we have jointly an employee named Donald J. Trump. He's our employee. ...[T]he reason he did that was ...[I]f you are an emissary... seeking a favor from Donald Trump, if you're an oil baron, or a coal company, or anybody else who wants a favor from the Trump administration, you got the message."

"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."

"The most widely read literature in Western Civilization is Jane Austen and her stories are about these young women... They're looking at these young men... "Oh, Mr. Darcey has 10,000... Mr. So & so has 5,000," and what they're talking about is... the British finance system in the 1700s and 1800s where wealthy people loaned... large amounts to the crown and were paid interest. ...All the crown had to do then was raise enough taxes from the poor and the middle class, to the extent there was one, to pay the interest. ...[W]hat have we been doing since 1980. Ronald Reagan came in saying he wanted a balanced budget. We last had a balanced budget under Richard Nixon. We have seen budget deficits grow enormously over the years to the point where the federal debt, not adjusted to inflation, was just under $1 trillion when Ronald Reagan came into office, and by the time George Bush leaves, it will be $10 trillion. ...Over $400 billion a year is just going to pay interest on the national debt. That means it's money we don't have for higher education, for infrastructure improvements so we don't have have bridges collapse and kill people in Minnesota when they're commuting home from work. So we don't have pinch points that are costing us billions and billions of dollars because we can't efficiently move goods around the country. We don't have it for all sorts of things that would grease the wheels of commerce and make us wealthier."

"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."

"I asked the federal government under an agency Trump just took control of, the (which has recovered multiples of its budget) for a copy of a receipt... evidence that a huge fine, supposedly paid by one of the banks was actually paid. ...[T]hey said... "You'll have to file a Freedom of Information Act request. This is the kind of administration we have."

"If you go... to the big stadiums where we are subsidizing commercial sports, $2 billion a year taxpayer subsidies to baseball, basketball, football and hockey. All the new facilities have these luxury boxes. Most of them are owned by companies, almost all of them are, which are a tax deductible expense. You want to buy a ticket to a baseball game, you pay with your after-tax dollar. People in the luxury box, this is a business expense because they're entertaining clients, and so you're subsidizing this because they're getting a deduction, and... the subsidy payments that you're making for these new stadiums are being used also to create private walkways, so that the wealthy that go to these boxes don't have to mingle with the likes of you and me, and we're the ones who are putting up the money so that they don't have to be with us!"

"[T]hese appointees that they put in place... are totally unqualified, and in many cases, enemies of the agencies they represent. Donald Trump's administration is turning America into what the ancient Greeks called a . ...[A] government of the worst people, the most venal, unqualified criminal elements around. The worst people. ...These are people who when they get called to testify, give answers that make it clear, they have no business being the manager of the little town I live in... much less running a cabinet agency."

"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."

"So when Trump came to the White House, the people he brought with him, Michael Flynn... Steve Bannon, [etc.] brought with them this team... Team Trump... [I]n the federal agencies, it's not just the incompetent, unqualified, anti-(to their oath of office) 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."

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

"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."

"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!"

"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?"

"[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."

"Americans have a pretty good idea of the chaos and the palace intrigues in the Trump White House. Journalists are actually doing a much better job of covering what's going on in the White House than I anticipated, partly because, even though Donald Trump is all about loyalty to Donald, there are all sorts of people eager to leak, who are in there not as close allies... and who want to position themselves for the future with journalists."

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

"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 [Labaree]... 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. ...[T]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. ...[P]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."