How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You With the Bill)
Free Lunch: David Cay Johnston is a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter.
“How the superrich consistently—and outrageously—rely on public handouts while preaching about free markets and wasteful entitlement programs all the way to the bank. The villains in David Cay Johnston’s tales run the gamut from railroad executives to sports-franchise owners to hedge-fund managers, all joined by a willingness to take enormous sums from public coffers while providing little or nothing in return.”
A mark of our times; much more than simply ‘corporate welfare’. There’s no shame in it: “institutionalized corruption that takes money from the many and concentrates it in the hands of the politically connected few”.
MotherJones has a very brief piece here.
Before entering politics, George W. Bush ran a money-losing baseball team, but ended up millions of dollars richer by getting a government-funded sweetheart deal on a new stadium.
“I’ve got the documents. President Bush, who will go down in history as the great tax cutter, owes almost all of his fortune to a tax increase that was funneled into his pocket.”
Amy Goodman at DemocracyNow interviews Cay Johnston here.
Amy: Explain the wealth transfer.
David: …We have created in the United States, largely in the last thirty years, a whole series of programs—a few of them explicit, many of them deeply hidden—that take money from the pockets of the poor and the middle class and upper middle class and funnel it to the wealthiest people in America. And among the biggest recipients of these subsidies are the wealthiest family America, the Waltons; George Steinbrenner; Donald Trump; a whole host of healthcare billionaires.
And these are policies that either have not been reported on or the news reporting on them generally has not informed people about what they really are.
The news media hasn’t done a good job.
What do we call a system that merely trickles up?