David Cay Johnston, FREE LUNCH
September 26th, 2008
Francesca interviews reporter David Cay Johnston about his investigation into how government policy is rigged to enrich the superwealthy.
The financial meltdown on Wall Street has many people asking how the government can find hundreds of billions of dollars to bailout the guys who brought us this mess, but always claims there’s no money for universal health care, foreclosure assistance, schools, or the environment?
David Cay Johnston says it’s all part of an endemic pattern of “corporate welfare”, where the spoils of government revenue go to the rich and rest of us end up poorer. Johnston was an investigative journalist for the New York Times for many years. His beat was taxation and he won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing loopholes and inequities in the U.S. tax code. His first book on the subject was Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich–and Cheat Everybody Else. His latest book is Free Lunch: How the wealthiest Americans enrich themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You With the Bill). Francesca talks to him about his latest book: FREE LUNCH: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and StickYou With the Bill).
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