David Johnston Quotes

Corporations have grown so powerful that they have inverted the Roman equation: rather than corporations existing to serve the state, the state serves them.

To disagree with Trump is to be wrong. To portray Trump in a way that does not fit with his image of himself is to be a loser. It is an approach to life that may work in business (where Trump can walk out and not deal with people who displease him), but government leaders do not enjoy that luxury, especially the president of the United States. If

Donald Trump’s mottos, “Always get even” and “Hit back harder than you were hit,

You will even read about an insurance company owned by one of America’s most admired billionaires that asked a paralyzed man to die because the cost of keeping him alive was cutting into the insurer’s profits.

Sixteen pages of Think Big are devoted to revenge. All of them run directly contrary to this basic biblical teaching. Trump leaves no room for doubt that revenge is a guiding principle of his life—“My motto is: Always get even.

Trump often threatens to sue journalists, ensuring caution from publishers and broadcasters who want to avoid a costly lawsuit—even one Trump cannot win. This tends to discourage investigation beyond the official talking points.

Trump distorts information, contradicts himself, and blocks inquiries into his conduct by journalists, law enforcement, business regulators, and other people’s lawyers. Again, the record shows decades of Trump’s skill in pursuing this strategy successfully.

No person, I think, ever saw a herd of buffalo, of which a few were fat and the great majority lean. No person ever saw a flock of birds, of which two or three were swimming in grease, and the others all skin and bone.” —Henry George, American reformer, 1839–1897

Trump had a history of firing experts like Tracy and replacing them with less-experienced yes men.

That is, of course, the kind of perspective we expect from mobsters, dictators, and others whose primary regard is for unflinching support, not for allegiance to truth or facts.

For years, Trump used fake identities to mislead journalists—and at least once to menace someone who was just doing their duty.

To disagree with Trump is to be wrong. To portray Trump in a way that does not fit with his image of himself is to be a loser. It

Many reporters accurately quote what they are told, but don’t know much about the underlying issues. For Trump and others like him, this makes it easy to manipulate most of the press.

How the promise of cheap, competitive and unlimited telecommunications service has been turned into a reality of expensive, monopolistic and limited service is just one part of the larger transformation in the American economy since the late 1970s.

Why do I have to repent or seek God’s forgiveness if I am not making mistakes?” Trump asked an Iowa audience of evangelicals in 2015. The report on this in the Christian Post quoted his words, then referred to Trump’s “alleged Christian faith.” Trump

Halliburton’s is a more extreme example, one in which a powerful and wealthy company transcends national borders so thoroughly that it is not an American company but a truly global enterprise with no allegiance to anything or anyone except the bottom line and the investors and executives who gain from its profits.

Trump spent two years suing author Tim O’Brien and his publisher for writing that his net worth was probably not in the billions, but rather the hundreds of millions. After a court dismissed the case, Trump made it clear that he merely wanted to harass O’Brien, not necessarily win damages. “I spent a couple of bucks on legal fees and they spent a whole lot more. I did it to make his life miserable, which I’m happy about,” Trump bragged. It was a comment that fit cozily within his philosophy of revenge. In

whenever Trump saw an opportunity to collect more money or to cut his costs by not paying people what they had earned, he did.

Judge Stewart ruled that Trump had engaged in a conspiracy to cheat the workers of their pay. At

Donald Trump is not a man who tries to understand how others perceive him. Rather, he dismisses those who do not see him as he sees himself. In

The worst of these are laws in nineteen states that let companies pocket the state income taxes withheld from their workers’ paychecks for up to twenty-five years.

You’ll learn in this book how other courts, including the United States Supreme Court, have diminished the rights of consumers, voters and workers while enhancing corporate power.

Trump has often boasted (in the past and on the campaign trail) that he buys the friendship of politicians so they “do what I want.” The

No other modern country gives corporations the unfettered power found in America to gouge customers, shortchange workers and erect barriers to fair play. A big reason is that so little of the news, which informs us about the world around us, addresses the private, government-approved mechanisms by which price gouging is employed to redistribute income upward.

The DGE prepared its own 111-page report. It noted that Trump owed (not owned, but owed) $3.2 billion. Of that, he had personally guaranteed $833.5 million. Absent an agreement by all creditors, Trump would face an uncontrolled, domino-effect chain of bankruptcies. If just one creditor moved against one Trump property, the others would follow, creating chaos. More

Donald would run for president after failing to vote in the 2002 general election and, as records indicate, in any Republican primary from 1989 until he voted for himself in 2016. Friedrich

At Trump University, we teach success,” Trump said, looking into the camera in a 2005 promotional video. “That’s what it’s all about—success. It’s going to happen to you. We’re going to have professors and adjunct professors that are absolutely terrific—terrific people, terrific brains, successful. We are going to have the best of the best. These are all people that are handpicked by me.” None of those statements were true. First,

This philosophy was ignored by the many pastors who endorsed Trump and accepted his statement that he is a Christian. That is worth pondering because revenge is explicitly rejected by Jesus and runs counter to the whole theme of the New Testament.

I love getting even when I get screwed by someone—yes, it is true … Always get even. When you are in business you need to get even with people who screw you. You need to screw them back fifteen times harder … go for the jugular, attack them in spades!” Trump

All this was done under the guise of “deregulation,” but the harsh truth is that there’s really no such thing. Everything has rules. Deregulation is just a disingenuous name for new regulation, too often under rules that favor corporations over their customers.

The faux university also did not have professors, not even part-time adjunct professors, and the “faculty” (as they were called) were certainly not “the best of the best.” They were commissioned sales people, many with no experience in real estate. One managed a fast food joint, as Senator Marco Rubio would point out during the March 3 Republican primary debate in 2016. Two other instructors were in personal bankruptcy while collecting fees from would-be Trump University graduates eager to learn how to get rich. Trump

Guthrie is best known for “This Land Is Your Land,” his ballad about the Dust Bowl, which gave farmers in his native Oklahoma an extra kick in the pants during the Great Depression. He set his thoughts about Trump’s rental policies to a song he titled “Old Man Trump.” The lyrics continue with this: Beach Haven ain’t my home! No, I just can’t pay this rent! My money’s down the drain, And my soul is badly bent! Beach Haven is Trump’s Tower Where no black folks come to roam, No, no, Old Man Trump! Old Beach Haven ain’t my home! More

In effect, Wisconsin politicians forced the owners of these 8,000 small, family-owned and taxpaying businesses to turn over a month’s profits so the money could be given to one of the biggest companies in the world, General Electric, and its partners to make a film glamorizing violent theft.

Taking wildly different positions on the value of assets and using his emotional state to justify those valuations helps explain something else Trump has done repeatedly. Congress requires all presidential candidates to file a financial disclosure statement listing their assets, liabilities, and income. Trump’s ninety-two-page disclosure report valued one of his best-known properties at more than $50 million. But he told tax authorities the same property was worth only about $1 million. He valued another signature Trump property at zero—and demanded the return of the property taxes he had already paid.

The fact that Trump paid no tax came to light when casino regulators issued a public report on his fitness to own a casino. Trump’s tax returns showed negative income. That’s because Congress lets big real estate investors offset their income from salaries, stock market gains, consulting fees, and other income with losses from depreciation in the value of their buildings. If these paper losses for the declining value of their buildings are greater than their cash income from other sources, real estate investors can legally tell the IRS that their income is less than zero and no federal income tax is due. Trump

The documentary also includes Trump summarizing his thoughts years after the USFL fold: “It was a nice experience,” he says. “It was fun. We had a great lawsuit.” Tollin extended Trump a courtesy in 2009 by sending him a rough cut of the film before it aired on ESPN. Trump was not happy with what he saw. In what had long before become a pattern when he was displeased, Trump took a thick, felt-tip pen to Tollin’s letter before mailing it back: “A third rate documentary and extremely dishonest—as you know. Best wishes,” Trump wrote, adding his distinctive, jaws-like signature. “P.S.—You are a loser.” Trump underlined the last word. To

thanks to the ease of Internet communications, and laws in most states permitting people to walk around carrying assault rifles and other weapons of war, the current crop of neo-Nazis, skinheads, and various hard-core hatemongers can easily recruit their niche audiences while putting fear into the hearts of other Americans.

For all his dealings with Trump, Sullivan was repeatedly astonished by the businessman’s lack of prudence. He said that whenever Trump saw an opportunity to collect more money or to cut his costs by not paying people what they had earned, he did. “Common sense just never took hold” when Trump had money on his mind, Sullivan told me several times. To

In The Art of the Deal, Trump boasts that when he applied for a casino owner’s license in 1981, he persuaded the New Jersey attorney general to limit the investigation of his background. It was perhaps the most lucrative negotiation of Trump’s life, one that would embarrass state officials a decade later when Trump’s involvement with mobsters, mob associates, and swindlers became clearer. New

The Hart focus group reminded us of what every con artist knows: people see what they want to see, hear what they want to hear, believe what they want to believe, and let their hopes and wishes vanquish their skepticism. Unless and until some fact they cannot reconcile slaps them hard in the face, the con’s marks will keep seeing the world through the credulous and distorted lens they fashioned for themselves.

Since none of the banks trusted Trump, the objective Leventhal evaluation was central to understanding the actual state of Trump’s finances. The Leventhal report showed that Trump was no billionaire: he had a net worth of minus $295 million. My story on that report ran across the front page of the Philadelphia Inquirer with the headline: “Bankers Say Trump May Be Worth Less Than Zero.” The lead sentence was, “You may well be worth more than Donald Trump.” Trump

In many of these subsidy programs, no jobs are created. Instead the state income taxes are given to companies that agree to move jobs from one state across the border to another, as AMC Theatres agreed to do in moving its headquarters from Kansas City, Missouri, to Leawood, Kansas, just ten miles away. AMC will get to pocket $47 million withheld from its workers, a boon to its major owners: J. P. Morgan, Apollo Management, the Carlyle Group and the firm Mitt Romney cofounded in 1984, Bain Capital Management.

As soon as Trump announced in 2015, I immediately set out to report what the mainstream news media were not. I wrote an early piece that posed twenty-one questions I thought reporters should ask on the campaign trail. Not one of them did. Late in the primaries, Senator Marco Rubio brought up my question about Trump University and Senator Ted Cruz posed my question about Trump’s dealings with the Genovese and Gambino crime families, matters explored in this book. I will always wonder what might have happened had journalists and some of the sixteen candidates vying with Trump for the Republican nomination started asking my questions months earlier. This

Minimally skilled labor is far more common in China than it is in the United States. This means that until the vast supply of Chinese labor is fully employed, the forces of supply and demand, combined with our government’s current rules, will relentlessly force more and more jobs to move to China, depressing wages in the United States.

Minimally skilled labor is far more common in China than it is in the United States. This means that until the vast supply of Chinese labor is fully employed, the forces of supply and demand, combined with our government’s current rules, will relentlessly force more and more jobs to move to China, depressing wages in the United States. The process will continue in other countries with vast labor pools and enough stability to attract capital. By the time a global equilibrium is reached and the downward pressure on American wages eases we will all be dead—and so may our great grandchildren’s great grandchildren.

The first two jobs revolutions had in common one trait—people of average or even below-average intelligence could do many of the jobs with no more than a high school education. Will that be true in the digital, high tech third wave? And if it is not, what will be the consequences of living in a society where the brightest and hardest working are rewarded and almost everyone else is reduced to servant-level jobs and wages? Among leading economists, the belief is nearly universal that this third revolutionary wave rolling across the globe is so powerful that nothing can stop it or even alter its course. There are, Blinder says, no cures, just palliatives. He suggests spending more on job retraining, changing the education system for the future, making health care available to all whether they have a job or not, and improved protections for pensions.

At the end of 2006, the United States was spending more for what it bought overseas than it sold, resulting in a record trade deficit of $902 billion. That meant that for every dollar generated by the American economy about seven cents was leaving the country, worsening America’s status as the world’s most indebted nation. Just a generation ago we were the world’s leading creditor nation. As Warren Buffett calculates it, America is selling close to 2 percent of its wealth each year to sustain our appetite for imported oil and cheap manufactured goods, many of them mere trinkets.

William Blackstone’s famous observation that it is better that some who are guilty go free than even one person who is innocent be wrongly imprisoned—so that people have reason to obey the law because it is just.

Complaints about the sale of Magnequench were made to the U.S. government because of the military applications for the magnets. Still, the Clinton administration, an ardent proponent of globalization, approved the sale. It did impose one condition: that the new owners keep magnet production and technology in the United States. Soon the new owners of Magnequench were busy buying up other magnet factories in the United States, including GA Powders, an Idaho firm that had used taxpayer money to develop the powerful new magnets. Once the new owners had a monopoly on production of these powerful magnets in the United States, they began shutting down facilities and moving manufacturing to China.

After President Nixon’s visit to China in 1972, American oil companies sought to explore there. Right off, they asked the Chinese to enact a corporate income tax. The Chinese were bewildered. To a Communist Party official, taught that the state should own the means of production, a corporate income tax was a bizarre idea. Besides, who ever asks to be taxed? All became clear when the Americans explained their intent. The American oil companies did not want to actually pay taxes, but to reduce their obligations to the United States government. The American businessmen and their tax lawyers explained that Congress taxes corporations (and individuals) on their worldwide income. With a Chinese corporate income tax, however, the taxes they owed to the United States would go down for two reasons. The first reason is that American business profits earned overseas are not taxed so long as the money stays offshore. The second reason is that the United States allows American companies to reduce taxes on their profits by the amount they pay to foreign governments. This is not the usual deduction worth 35 cents on the dollar, but a dollar-for-dollar credit. Thus a dollar of tax paid by Exxon Mobil to Beijing is a dollar not paid to Washington.

Tricia Newbold, one of the White House employees who works on security clearances, told a House committee that at least 25 Trump staffers got clearances over objections from those whose job was to vet applicants. Newbold told the committee that “two current senior White House officials” were among those given clearances despite “a wide range of serious disqualifying issues involving foreign influence, conflicts of interest, concerning personal conduct, financial problems, drug use, and criminal conduct.” The background check of one person, publicly described only as “Senior White House Official 1,” uncovered “significant disqualifying factors, including foreign influence, outside activities (‘employment outside or business external to what your office at the [Executive Office of the President] entails’), and personal conduct.

Jared, for instance, omitted from his SF86 that Trump Tower meeting with the Kremlin agents, his request to Kislyak to use secure Russian diplomatic communications, and a meeting he had had with the head of a Russian “bank” that the FBI regards as a front for Russian spying. The FBI had caught spies at the bank’s Manhattan office posing as bankers. Any one of those omissions too would be reason to deny a security clearance.

In December 2016, Jared again demonstrated his disloyalty. He approached Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the U.S., and asked to use the Russian embassy’s secure communications link to contact the Kremlin without the knowledge of American national security agencies. Ponder that for a moment. Ask yourself what would have happened if anyone close to Obama or any other previous president had done this.

Loyalty is the most treasured virtue, far above honor or talent or love, and the greatest guarantee of loyalty can be found in kin ties.” That would explain not only the security clearances but why Trump gave his son-in-law such a broad portfolio of issues in which neither of them had a wisp of expertise. Trump had no training in diplomacy, but he had a nose for developing lucrative relationships and knew he could trust Jared to do what he wanted and to keep secrets within the family.

Congress should also prohibit the appointment of relatives in the first and second degrees from positions other than on honorary boards and commissions with minor duties. When John F. Kennedy made his brother Robert attorney general in 1961 he may have made a wise choice, but that decision should not excuse nepotism in a nation with no shortage of talent for high government positions. As Sarah Kendzior and others have shown, nepotism is an early indicator of likely criminality and dictatorial tendencies. Two

Congress should also prohibit the appointment of relatives in the first and second degrees from positions other than on honorary boards and commissions with minor duties. When John F. Kennedy made his brother Robert attorney general in 1961 he may have made a wise choice, but that decision should not excuse nepotism in a nation with no shortage of talent for high government positions. As Sarah Kendzior and others have shown, nepotism is an early indicator of likely criminality and dictatorial tendencies. Two other reforms would encourage integrity. One would be to strengthen our whistleblower laws. Various journalists, me included, got information from whistleblowers during the Trump years. But not until he was out of office did we learn about the use of secret subpoenas to seize telephone, email and other records of members of Congress who were critical of the president and some journalists under surveillance, which is anathema to a free society. That kind of action is outrageous, but it also shows the reason we need to strengthen whistleblower protections

In his four years as president of the United States, Donald Trump bullied, cheated, denied, and lied because that’s who he is. He is a con artist always looking for another mark, a man who has let billions of dollars slip through his fingers because prudence and judgment are concepts alien to his nature.

Just the four trips he made to Mar-a-Lago over five weeks in February and March 2017 cost taxpayers $13.6 million, the Government Accounting Office determined.

Zephyr Teachout’s 2016 book, Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin’s Snuff Box to Citizens United.

When we finally get a full accounting, we will learn how much he benefited from forcing taxpayers to spend for his hotel rooms, golf cart rentals, meals, and other expenses at his properties. The bill, excluding necessary security costs, will run into many millions of dollars.

Trump

A phrase from Mastercoin’s David Johnston that some in the cryptocurrency community call Johnston’s law could come true: “Everything that can be decentralized will be decentralized.

Two scholars who served on the staff of President Reagan’s 1982 National Commission on Social Security Reform explain that Social Security does more to reduce income inequality and prevent poverty among the old in the United States than any other program, public or private, while providing crucial protection for orphans and the disabled. And, contrary to widely circulated claims, they show it does not add one dollar to the federal government’s budget deficits and can remain financially sound as long as our government exists.

Generations of Americans built our Social Security system to provide basic and widespread protection against loss of earnings arising from the death, disability, or retirement of working Americans—for themselves, their families, and those who follow.

Social Security gives concrete expression to widely held and time-honored American commitments. Grounded in values of shared responsibility and concern for all members of society, it reflects an understanding that, as citizens and human beings, we all share certain risks and vulnerabilities; and we all have a stake in advancing practical mechanisms of self- and mutual support. It is based on the belief that government—which is simply all of us acting collectively—can and should uphold these values by providing practical, dignified, secure, and efficient means to protect Americans and their families against risks they all face.

Social Security runs seamlessly and efficiently—less than 1 percent of its expenditures are for administration.

Although Social Security’s benefits are modest, they are extremely important for the vast majority of beneficiaries, especially those with low and moderate incomes.

Without Social Security, the official U.S. poverty rate among the aged would jump from 9 percent to nearly 50 percent—about the same rate as in the 1920s and early 1930s, prior to the enactment of Social Security.

One change we believe should be made is increasing the maximum amount of wages on which Social Security’s contributions are assessed. Contributions are assessed only on the wages that are insured against loss.

The worst proposals are to radically transform Social Security by privatizing, which would put people at the mercy of the stock and bonds markets as well as cost much more to administer or to add means-testing which would deny benefits to higher-income workers. Either of these ideas would destroy the fundamental features that have made Social Security so successful, and wildly popular, which is what opponents of Social Security want to destroy so they can end the program.

The reality is that Social Security is not a government handout. It is a benefit that is earned and paid for through hard work.

Wage insurance works best when all workers are covered under the same plan and the coverage starts at the beginning of their working lives. The only entity that can mandate this kind of universal program is the federal government and it has.

It is no coincidence that pollution so often accompanies poverty. Imagine a cost-benefit analysis of siting an undesirable facility, such as a landfill or incinerator. Benefits are often measured by willingness to pay for environmental improvement. Wealthy communities are able and willing to pay more for the benefit of not having the facility in their backyards; thus when measured this way the net benefits to society as a whole will be maximized by putting the facility in a low-income area.

Having described the unprecedented scale of imprisonment in America, we may still ask: is America’s use of imprisonment really a justifiable (and effective) solution to an epidemic of crime? Indeed, with crime rates at historic lows, one might even conclude that all this imprisonment is a good thing. Or is it a problem in its own right? How can we assess the significance of mass incarceration in America?

Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot all employed mass imprisonment, each presiding over a process that arrested and incarcerated millions. Such systems are often part of massive programs of slave labor or forced resettlement, in which high death rates are a typical by-product. And some examples of mass incarceration are explicitly part of a program of ethnic cleansing or genocide—a tool of policy that intends the extermination of entire populations. But now, for the first time, we see mass incarceration in a democratic society.

The judicial mechanisms that states employ to accomplish programs of mass incarceration include laws and strategies of enforcement explicitly designed to imprison large populations. Methods include expansion of the list of criminal offenses punishable by prison terms, as well as harsher sentencing practices that impose long prison terms for crimes not previously prosecuted at all: being Jewish in Nazi Germany, or being an enemy of the state in Stalin’s Russia.

the rapid growth of a larger prison system creates an expanded and more powerful system of “correctional” administration, which tends to have self-perpetuating features.

Today, the United States has the highest rate of imprisonment of any nation in the world—possibly the highest rate in the history of any nation.

Part of this is related to the vast apparatus created to administer the criminal-justice system; part is related to the new laws that mandate longer sentences and keep the prisons full of older inmates for longer periods; part is due to the rules governing release and reentry—parole policies that lower the threshold for violations and ensure recidivism; and part is the result of lasting damage done to the families and the social fabric of the communities from which most prisoners are drawn.

Not surprisingly, this huge American “industry” has huge political clout—with the expansion of prosecutorial and correctional workers’ power, the growing number of lobbyists for these groups, and the many vendors who build and service prisons.

Longer sentences also build incarceration rates and create a chronic condition of social incapacitation for those imprisoned, as they face severe restrictions on their rights and opportunities after release from prison. Individuals who enter prison and become a case in the criminal-justice system today have a 50 percent or more chance of remaining under the system’s control for life with recurrent arrests and periods of incarceration.

In 2008, one in a hundred American adults was behind bars. Just what manner of people does our prison policy reveal us to be?

a massive, malign indifference to people of color is at work.

In America, criminal justice policies have become a second line of defense, if you will, against individuals whose development has not been adequately fostered by other societal institutions, like welfare, education, employment and job training, mental-health programs, and other social initiatives.

We should also remember that punishment and inequality are intimately linked—that the causality runs in both directions. Disparities in punishment reflect socioeconomic inequalities, but they also help produce and reinforce them.

Before Ms. magazine was a gleam in Gloria Steinem’s eye, men had quite a deal. Married middle-class men often controlled the purse while enjoying the pleasures of a full-time homemaker, who might work a few hours here and there for “pin money” they could spend on themselves. Mothers of small children seldom worked full-time.

Women run a majority of nonprofit organizations with budgets under $1 million. But as budgets grow, the ranks of women shrink.

Millions of Americans instinctively associate “poverty” with “black.

it shouldn’t be the case that the only route out of poverty is to get married to someone who also has a job.

The disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition is the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.” —Adam Smith, father of market economics, 1723–1790, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759)

Some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world. This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system.” —Pope Francis I, 1936–

The most immediate is that our middle class is too weak to support the consumer spending that has historically driven our economic growth.

the hollowing out of the middle class since the 1970s, a phenomenon interrupted only briefly in the 1990s, means that those families are unable to invest in their future, by educating themselves and their children and by starting or improving businesses.

the weakness of the middle class is holding back tax receipts, especially because those at the top are so adroit in avoiding taxes and in getting Washington to give them tax breaks.

inequality is associated with more frequent and more severe boom-and-bust cycles that make our economy more volatile and vulnerable.

More than a fifth of our children live in poverty—the second worst of all the advanced economies, putting us behind countries like Bulgaria, Latvia, and Greece.

Today the United States is by far the most unequal rich democracy in the world.

DOES EVERYONE IN AND NO ONE OUT INCLUDE ALL IMMIGRANTS? Immigrants contribute tens of billions of dollars to our economy, and the sustainability of programs such as Social Security and Medicare to a significant extent depends on taxes paid by such workers. Further, health costs for immigrants are about one-third those of NHWs. Ethical, religious, and humane issues could all be raised to support improving access to care for such immigrants.

1969 a Republican president proposed a Family Assistance Plan that would have guaranteed a basic income for all American families. Editorial opinion then was 95 percent in favor of such support to families. Our values at that time were to decry the poverty in our midst to try to make it vanish from the country. President Nixon’s bill passed the House of Representatives, then languished in the Senate. When Nixon became embroiled in the Watergate scandal it died—along with a credible, feasible plan to strengthen the health of families in this country and prevent what was soon to become a relentless decline in our relative health.

By 2012 the average income of the vast majority had shrunk to the equivalent of 45 weeks of 1973 income—a 13 percent decline to $30,997 from $35,584 in 1973, expressed in 2012 dollars.