Product Description

The bestselling author of Perfectly Legal returns with a powerful new exposé

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4105 in Books
• Published on: 2007-12-27
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 352 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Johnston, a New York Times investigative reporter, has spent his 40-year career exposing collusion between government officials and private sector entities as they enrich the rich and ignore consequences for middle-class laborers and the poor. In Perfectly Legal, he focused on hidden inequities in the tax system. This volume is a broader examination of collusion and unfairness, ranging from subsidies for professional sports stadiums to secret payouts to multinational corporate chief executives. At the base of Johnston's journalistic indictment are the highly paid lobbyists working Congress, state legislatures, county commissions, city councils and government regulatory agencies. Johnston also cites the culpability of George W. Bush in his roles as professional baseball team owner, Texas governor and U.S. president, and targets well-known tycoons such as Donald Trump, Warren Buffett and George Steinbrenner as well as lesser-recognized beneficiaries who own golf courses and insurance companies and energy consortiums. Heroes appear occasionally, such as Remy Welling, an Internal Revenue Service investigator who blew the whistle on improper tax breaks for the wealthy and lost her job. Johnston writes compellingly to show how government-private sector collusion affects the middle class and the poor. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From AudioFile
Here's a shocking novel with an amazing plot. Donald Trump, Ken Lay, and George Steinbrenner all conspire to siphon billions of dollars from the American middle class. Wait--it's not a novel! It's all true! Hang on to your wallets as NEW YORK TIMES reporter David Cay Johnston documents the various "corporate welfare" ploys used by sports franchises, retailers, megacorps, and anybody else who knows how to parlay a bad balance sheet into political patronage. The rich don't just get richer--they get way richer. Johnston narrates his own work with a newscaster's tone and perspective. His direct tone keeps listeners engaged throughout. R.W.S. © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Review
“If you’re concerned about congressional earmarks, stock options (especially backdated options), hedge fund tax breaks, abuse of eminent domain, subsidies to sports teams, K Street lobbyists, the state of our health-care system, to say nothing of the cavernous gap between rich and poor, you’ll read this fine book—as I did—with a growing sense of outrage. Free Lunch makes it clear that it’s high time for ‘We the People’ to stand up and be counted.”
—John C. Bogle, founder and former chairman, The Vanguard Group

“With clarity, conciseness, and cool, fact-saturated analysis, Mr. Johnston, the premier investigative reporter on how industry and commerce shift risks and costs to taxpayers, sends the ultimate message to all Americans—either we demand to have a say or we will continue to pay, pay, and pay.”
—Ralph Nader

Customer Reviews

Read in small doses
This book is probably best read in small portions, as the average person will become incensed at the greed that takes from the less and gives to the more. Fortunately, each chapter covers a specific rip off of the taxpayer, and is not too long. It might raise the blood pressure of the average person to read too many chapters at one time.

Yes, the wealthy and connected have rigged the system to flow the riches to themselves.

If there is one theme to the book, it is the Adam Smith's advice that government should not favor one endeavor over another is deaf to the people that continually use Adam Smith as the reason for government getting out of the way. It is not free enterprise when government takes one side, which is what the wealthy and well connected have the government do.

A good companion is Hostile Takeover by David Sirota (available on Amazon Kindle).Hostile Takeover: How Big Money and Corruption Conquered Our Government--And How We Take It Back

His prior book, Perfectly Legal, is a good primer, although a bit dated as to how the wealthy avoid taxes. In Free Lunch, it is how the wealthy get subsidies. Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich--and Cheat Everybody Else

Greed Oligarchy Plutocracy
An excellent, well-documented and readable investigation and analysis of how the whole system of American government, at Federal, State and Local levels, has been used for the past 30 years or so to tax the poor and the middle class in order to enrich the already wealthy. If you think this sounds like the system in France in 1788, you are absolutely right. If you are not angry already, you need to read this book. If you are angry already, you still need to read this book in order to confirm all your worst suspicions. There is something rotten in the States of America, and if the infection of our body politic is not dealt with soon, it will turn to gangrene and kill democracy completely.

Free Lunch
A very informative and straight-ahead book revealing, anecdote by real-life anecdote, how, during the Bush/Clinton/Bush administrations, our public commons -- in other words, our tax dollars -- increasingly have been routinely commandeered by a tiny and superrich elite for their own exhorbitant profit. In the form of public subsidies for private developers and retailers, such as Cabelas and Wal-Mart, and through privatization of our utility companies starting with Enron's massive rip-off of our public commons, Johnston shows how the wolves (greedy privateers) have not only gained entrance into the henhouse of our national treasury but, through intensive lobbying efforts, are exercising too much control over our elected officials today, basically funding the rewriting of our national laws to ensure their own dominant position and ongoing aggregation of riches.

The book makes sense of a lot of things that were not adding up to me when looking around our current landscape -- like why my electric bill has skyrocketed in the last couple of years (thank you, Kenny Lay), or what kind of business "sense" was behind that monstrous box store of Cabelas on Rte. 78 in Hamburg, PA. Or even why oil and gas prices are going through the roof right now. It's not supply and demand at all, it's sleight of hand and basic greed and power-grabbing. Johnston shows how the scales of supply and demand no longer balance the markets, as the PR mavens would like us to believe. When private companies are subsidized with public funds, Adam Smith-type free market competition proves but a chimera, a smokescreen behind which privateers hide, avidly sucking our economy dry and bankrupting our society. Read the book.