BuzzFlash Reviews
Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and StickYou with the Bill) (Hardcover) Autographed by the Author
David Cay Johnston
BUZZFLASH REVIEWS
BuzzFlash is especially excited to see him publish "Free Lunch," since an interview we did with him on his last book, "Perfectly Legal," won us and him a first place "Project Censored Award" a couple years back. (It is one of two first place "Project Censored Awards" that we have won as an online publication.)
From the Publisher:
How does a strong and growing economy lend itself to job uncertainty, debt, bankruptcy, and economic fear for a vast number of Americans? Free Lunch provides answers to this great economic mystery of our time, revealing how today�s government policies and spending reach deep into the wallets of the many for the benefit of the wealthy few.
Johnston cuts through the official version of events and shows how, under the guise of deregulation, a whole new set of regulations quietly went into effect�regulations that thwart competition, depress wages, and reward misconduct. From how George W. Bush got rich off a tax increase to a $100 million taxpayer gift to Warren Buffett, Johnston puts a face on all of the dirty little tricks that business and government pull. A lot of people appear to be getting free lunches�but of course there�s no such thing as a free lunch, and someone (you, the taxpayer) is picking up the bill.
Johnston�s many revelations include:
� How we ended up with the most expensive yet inefficient health-care system in the world
� How homeowners� title insurance became a costly, deceitful, yet almost invisible oligopoly
� How our government gives hidden subsidies for posh golf courses
� How Paris Hilton�s grandfather schemed to retake the family fortune from a charity for poor children
� How the Yankees and Mets owners will collect more than $1.3 billion in public funds
In these instances and many more, Free Lunch shows how the lobbyists and lawyers representing the most powerful 0.1 percent of Americans manipulated our government at the expense of the other 99.9 percent.
With his extraordinary reporting, vivid stories, and sharp analysis, Johnston reveals the forces that shape our everyday economic lives�and shows us how we can finally make things better.
About David Cay Johnston:
In 1995 David Cay Johnston persuaded the editors of The New York Times to hire him to see if he could devise a new way to cover taxes, focusing on how the system operates rather than what politicians say about it. His work has resulted in shutting so many tax dodges, in pressing so many new laws and regulations and enforcement efforts that some tax policy officials now consider him, as one tax law professor put it, "the de facto chief tax enforcement officer of the United States."
He won a Pulitzer Prize in 2001 for his running investigation of our tax system and was a finalist for that award in 2000 and in 2003 for beat reporting and for national reporting.
His last book, Perfectly Legal, was a New York Times bestseller and honored as Book of the Year by the journalism organization Investigative Reporters and Editors. Over his forty-year career he has won many other honors, including a George Polk Award.
In 1968 Mr. Johnston began his career when he talked his way, at age 19, into a job as a staff writer for the San Jose Mercury. When he left nearly five years later he was still its youngest reporter.
He was an investigative reporter for the Detroit Free Press in its Lansing bureau 1973-76; a reporter for the Los Angeles Times in San Francisco and then Los Angeles from 1976 to 1988; a reporter and, briefly, editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1988 until he joined The New York Times in February 1995.
He studied economics at the University of Chicago graduate school and at six other colleges, earning six years of college credits but no degree because he took upper level and graduate level courses almost exclusively.
Over the years Mr. Johnston's many investigations included hunting down a murderer the police had failed to catch, winning freedom for Tony Cooks, to whom a trial judge said "I believe you are innocent, but I sentence you to life in prison."
He was the first reporter to seriously investigate the Los Angeles Police Department, exposing mismanagement, inefficiency, brutality and a worldwide political spying operation. The LAPD now operates under the aegis of the federal government.
He helped save a third of a billion dollars from being snatched from poor children by Barron Hilton. He exposed misuse of charitable funds at the United Ways in Los Angeles in 1986 and Washington, D.C., in 2002 and exposed news manipulations at the most profitable television station in America, WJIM-TV, that ultimately forced the sale of that station and five others. He also broke the story that Donald Trump was no billionaire, but, according to his own documents, actually had a negative net worth in 1990.
His previous book, Temples of Chance, exposed the fraudulent way that New Jersey regulates casinos. It is under development in Hollywood as a motion picture about the characters he described in Temples of Chance.
Mr. Johnston lives in Rochester, New York, with his wife, Jennifer Leonard, and their two daughters. He has six grown children and four grandsons.
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