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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Ideally, major windows should face within 30° of true (not magnetic) south. The deviation between true and magnetic south varies depending on where you build.

successful passive solar designs need many fewer windows—the equivalent of between 8 percent and 12 percent of the floor area in rooms with south-facing windows. That

Donald no doubt enjoys the bridge player’s definition of trump: a winning play by a card that outranks all others. But other definitions include “a thing of small value, a trifle” and “to deceive or cheat” as well as “to blow or sound a trumpet.” As a verb, trump means “to devise in an unscrupulous way” and “to forge, fabricate or invent,” as in “trumped-up” charges. Donald

Some people argue with the question posed to them, as Bill Clinton infamously did when he said under oath: “It depends on what your definition of is is.” Others veer off on verbal tangents, hoping to steer the conversation in another direction. Some celebrities arrange to talk to the cameras outside a hearing room just as the main witness against them is about to speak. Some say they need to check their records before answering. And many people use the one catchall that usually cannot be disproved: I don’t recall. That last option would seem unavailable to Trump, since he declared in October that he enjoys “the world’s greatest memory.” Trump

classic public relations strategy is to confront damaging information by getting it out fully and fast so you can put it behind you.

A classic public relations strategy is to confront damaging information by getting it out fully and fast so you can put it behind you.

Erecting gaudy buildings did not bring Donald Trump the national attention he craved. It was football that made him famous. Hiring a new general manager for his real estate firm drew little media attention, but “I hire a coach for a football team and there are sixty or seventy reporters calling to interview me.” Trump’s foray into professional football provides an early example of a business career built on breaking, ignoring, or making up rules. In

In 1988, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals explicitly rejected the theory Trump had sold to the other owners—that a lawsuit was an appropriate way to force the NFL to merge with the USFL. The court, in the formal language of legal opinions, chastised both Trump and the owners who went along with him. Judge Ralph K. Winter Jr. wrote that “what the USFL seeks is essentially a judicial restructuring of major-league professional football to allow it to enter” into a merger with the NFL. Calling the NFL “a highly successful entertainment product,” Judge Winter observed that “new sports leagues must be prepared to make the investment of time, effort and money that develops interest and fan loyalty and results in an attractive product for the media. The jury in the present case obviously found that patient development of a loyal following among fans and an adherence to an original plan that offered long-run gains were lacking … The jury found that the failure of the USFL was not the result of the NFL’s television contracts but of its own decision to seek entry into the NFL on the cheap.” The appeals court decision, which the United States Supreme Court let stand, was a stinging rebuke of Trump’s effort to use litigation to obtain what he was unwilling to achieve by patiently devoting time, money, and effort in the market. Years

In 1990, I broke the story that, instead of being worth billions, as he’d claimed, Trump actually had a negative net worth and escaped a chaotic collapse into personal bankruptcy only when the government took his side over the bank’s, as you will read. Before

Trump, who presents himself as a modern Midas even when much of what he touches turns to dross, has studied the conventions of journalists and displays more genius at exploiting them to his advantage than anyone else I have ever known. More

The Trump family’s deep roots in Germany stretch back to the war-ravaged seventeenth century, when the family name was Drumpf. In 1648, they simplified the name to one that would prove to be a powerful brand for their latter-day descendants. Looking

Trump says NBC paid him $65 million for Celebrity Apprentice in both 2011 and 2012 (NBC, in a written statement, said that figure was wildly inflated). If

Whatever your views, become deeply informed. The Founders believed that knowledge and reason must be the cornerstones of our representative democracy if we are to govern ourselves. So spend time learning and then do your duty as a citizen. Vote. David

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.

Revenge is the philosophy of dictators and mob bosses everywhere and always, used

Out of their average incomes of nearly $174 million, under the Bush tax cuts the top 400 taxpayers would have paid the government 17.5 percent in income, Social Security, and Medicare taxes. For people who make $100,000 to $200,000, the tax burden is much higher at 20.6 percent.

Quality and investment return are antithetical,” Gumbiner concluded, “because in order to generate short-term profits, the company cannot put money into research and development, new long-range concepts, management training, and all the things that will build a long-term successful organization. People who strictly have investors’ return as their motive are not interested in long-term corporate guarantees.

Americans are less healthy even though we spend far more, according to the 2007 McKinsey Global Institute report cited earlier. McKinsey compared 124 countries. It found that our system’s inefficiencies and waste costs us an extra half trillion dollars a year. This excess cost works out to $1.3 billion every day. The study concluded that $75 billion of this was due solely to the fact that these other countries had public health systems.

Our expensive, inefficient health care system is also making us less competitive in an increasingly competitive world. Toyota rejected offers from Alabama and other states for extremely generous subsidies and tax breaks in 2005 that basically amounted to giving the company a free factory if it would locate there. A nearly free factory, Toyota concluded, was worth less than avoiding the continuing cost of health care for the factory workers. Health care costs the Detroit automakers more than the steel in cars.

Subsidy economics tends to drive prices up, not down, as recipients chase subsidies more than customers. Adam Smith figured this out in 1776. He examined the subsidies in his day for commercial fishing. In his era the word bounty referred to gifts the government bestowed on the owners of herring ships. He concluded that to collect subsidies, people will appear to engage in a commercial activity. Smith wrote: The bounty [subsidy] to the white-herring fishery is a tonnage bounty; and is proportioned to the burden [size] of the ship, not to her diligence or success in the fishery; and it has, I am afraid, been too common for vessels to fit out for the sole purpose of catching, not the fish, but the bounty.

Although baseball, basketball, football, and hockey teams are all privately held, they disclose limited information about their finances. From that data, one crucial fact can be distilled: while some teams are profitable, overall the sports-team industry does not earn any profit from the market. Industry profits all come from the taxpayers. In a market economy, the team owners would have to adjust or cover the losses out of their own deep pockets. Instead they rely on the kindness of taxpayers to enrich themselves at the expense of the vast majority who never attend these sporting events.

The huge gifts of money that wealthy owners of sports teams wheedle out of taxpayers are a free lunch that someone must fund. Often that burden falls on poor children and the ambitious among the poor. Sports-team subsidies undermine a century of effort to build up the nation’s intellectual capacity and, thus, its wealth. Andrew Carnegie poured money from his nineteenth-century steel fortune into local libraries across America because he was certain it would build a better and more prosperous nation, which indeed it did. These libraries imposed costs on taxpayers, but they also returned benefits as the nation’s store of knowledge grew. That is, library spending is a prime example of a subsidy adding value.

Many people born into modest circumstances have risen to great heights because they could educate themselves for free, and stay out of trouble, at the public library. To cite one example, Tom Bradley, the son of a sharecropper, learned enough at the local library as a boy to join the Los Angeles Police Department. He rose to become its highest ranking black officer in 1958 when he made lieutenant. Bradley went on to be mayor for two decades. But today library hours, as well as budgets to buy books, have been slashed in Los Angeles, Detroit, Baltimore, and other cities, yet there is plenty of money to give away to sports-team owners.

Art Modell, who pitted Cleveland and Baltimore against each other in a bidding war for his football team, was asked in 1996 about tax money going into his pocket at a time when libraries were being closed. It was a well-framed question. His Baltimore Ravens is the only major sports team whose name is a literary allusion, to the haunting poem by Edgar Allan Poe for his lost love Lenore. “The pride and the presence of a professional football team is far more important than 30 libraries,” Modell said. He spoke without a hint of irony or any indication that he had ever upon a midnight dreary, pondered weak and weary the effect of his greed on the human condition.

Threatening to move a team unless the public pays up has become a finely developed enterprise. Arranging to collect this legal loot employs lobbyists, economists, and marketing firms, all charging hefty fees for their help in digging into the pockets of taxpayers. When Modell was playing Cleveland off against Baltimore, Betty Montgomery, then the Ohio attorney general, came up with a one-word description of this tactic: blackmail.

the Supreme Court in 1922 and again in 1953 exempted Major League Baseball from the laws of competition. The other three leagues—basketball, football, and hockey—are effectively exempted from most of the laws of business competition, as well. This exemption from the laws of competition is crucial to their power to extract subsidies.

The crucial issue when a subsidy is proposed is the impact on the finances of the local government, known as fiscal impact. Unless the annual flows of tax revenues more than pay for the bonds being issued, then some other part of the municipal budget will suffer. Even then it will probably suffer because people’s budgets for recreation are limited. A dollar spent at the ballpark is a dollar not spent at a restaurant, bar, or other place of leisure time activity, thus transferring the jobs and economic effects from many businesses to a single sports team.

In 1986, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan sponsored a law banning the use of tax-free bonds to finance stadiums, exactly the financing being used by the Yankees and the Mets. So how did Steinbrenner and the Mets owners get around that law? How did they manage to benefit from triple tax-free municipal bonds that add to the burdens of federal, state, and city taxpayers? First, the Yankees and the Mets will not pay rent on their new stadiums, which the city will own. If they paid rent, the Moynihan law would prohibit the sale of tax-exempt bonds to finance the stadiums. But since the stadium bonds must be paid for, where will the money come from?

The Bill of Rights sets the standard for payment of seized property as “just compensation.” Invoking eminent domain inherently lowers market values. It does this by putting a cloud over continued ownership, making just a synonym for discounted. Eminent domain also creates an incentive for governments to offer the lowest price they can get away with. Landowners who do not like the price offered by government can go to court. Such a challenge requires deep pockets to finance litigation, itself a risky enterprise. Most people, faced with a government determined to seize their property, just take what they can and get out.

Under government rules, tax returns are accepted as filed unless the IRS audits and then challenges a return. The two years that Bush’s return would have been most likely to be selected for audit, 2000 and 2001, were the record low years for audits of high-income Americans. The richest taxpayers benefited mightily those years because, at the insistence of the most right-wing Republicans in Congress, the IRS focused on tax returns filed by the working poor. In 1999, for the first time, those who made less than $25,000 were more likely to be audited than those who made more than $100,000.

The proliferation of state and local tax incentives designed to attract or retain business investment…has proven troublingly resistant to reform. Despite a growing recognition…that the competition over business incentives is at best a zero-sum game…the size of the incentive packages offered for large corporate facilities reaches ever-new heights…. The only consistent winners are the large businesses that can pit one jurisdiction against another for reduced tax burdens, while other taxpayers and citizens pay the costs in constrained government services and higher taxes.

The issue of whether Chrysler’s tax breaks were unfair to competing businesses and individuals is how the Articles of Confederation come into play. Under the first American government, from 1781 to 1788, the states regulated commerce. They used this power to enact tariffs to protect their own businesses. Anyone trying to import, say, furniture into New York from Connecticut faced a heavy tariff by New York, and Connecticut retaliated with its own tariffs. This economic warfare was destroying the whole experiment in self-governance. Efforts to find a solution transformed into the Constitutional Convention. The Constitution grants Congress the power to regulate commerce “among the several states.” Implied, but not explicitly stated, is the power of the federal government to block protectionist tariffs and similar devices that discriminate.

Buffett is a master at delaying the payment of taxes not for a little while, but for a generation. His MidAmerican Energy Company owns electric and natural gas utilities, with operations from Oregon and Utah through Iowa and east to Britain. It paid just 4 percent of its American profits in federal corporate income taxes in 2006, far less than most Americans paid on their incomes. On its overseas profits, MidAmerican paid a 21 percent tax.

This unstated coordination gave the producers of electricity what economists call market power, which means the ability to set prices higher than a competitive market would allow. Within less than a hundred rounds of bidding, Talukdar’s experimental auctions resembled not so much a competitive market as a cartel, in which many sellers obtain monopoly power by coordinating their actions to artifically inflate prices. That is what OPEC, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, does openly when members collude on setting the price of oil by limiting production.

Government rules permit and encourage a vicious cycle. To the extent that pensions are not fully funded, that their true costs are not paid each year, it means that corporate profits are inflated. Inflated profits mean that share prices for company stock are inflated, because they should represent the profitability of companies. And inflated stock prices mean, in turn, that executives cash in their options for more than they should get.

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.

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.

Sam Walton practiced corporate socialism. As much as he could, he put the public’s money to work for his benefit. Free land, long-term leases at below-market rates, pocketing sales taxes, even getting workers trained at government expense were among the ways Wal-Mart took every dollar of welfare it could get. Walton had a particular fondness for government-sponsored industrial revenue bonds, which cost him lessin interest charges than the corporate bonds the market economy uses to raise money.

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.