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Everything you know about taxes is wrong
Jan. 27th, 2005 04:09 pmFrom City Pages:
Investigative reporter David Cay Johnston has spent his entire, storied career trying to prove that there’s a better way to write about topics most reporters find too tricky or complex or too dull to interest readers. As a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, he was among the first to expose mismanagement, inefficiency, and brutality in the Los Angeles Police Department. He went on to rout out the misuse of charitable funds at the United Way in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., and to document New Jersey’s fraudulent system of casino regulation, among other stories.
In 1995, tired of reading stories by other reporters who covered the U.S. tax system by writing about what politicians said instead of how the system actually operates, he talked the New York Times into hiring him. In the 10 years since, Johnston has demonstrated, amply and relentlessly, that there is indeed a better way to cover taxes. His stories have forced the closing of so many dodges and loopholes and the creation of so many new laws and regulations that he's been nicknamed "the de facto chief tax enforcement officer of the United States." He won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for beat reporting, and has been a Pulitzer finalist three other times since 2000.
Last year, Johnston published the fruits of all that prize-winning reporting in his book Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich--and Cheat Everybody Else. A bestseller and the winner of a 2004 Investigative Reporters and Editors award, the book documents how, over the last three decades, the tax system has been twisted to subsidize the wealthiest 1 percent of the country. Johnston recently talked to City Pages about the book, the damage this reverse Robin Hood scheme is doing to the other 99 percent of Americans, and about the perils posed to democracy by the growing inequalities of the system.
Read the article here.
Investigative reporter David Cay Johnston has spent his entire, storied career trying to prove that there’s a better way to write about topics most reporters find too tricky or complex or too dull to interest readers. As a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, he was among the first to expose mismanagement, inefficiency, and brutality in the Los Angeles Police Department. He went on to rout out the misuse of charitable funds at the United Way in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., and to document New Jersey’s fraudulent system of casino regulation, among other stories.
In 1995, tired of reading stories by other reporters who covered the U.S. tax system by writing about what politicians said instead of how the system actually operates, he talked the New York Times into hiring him. In the 10 years since, Johnston has demonstrated, amply and relentlessly, that there is indeed a better way to cover taxes. His stories have forced the closing of so many dodges and loopholes and the creation of so many new laws and regulations that he's been nicknamed "the de facto chief tax enforcement officer of the United States." He won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for beat reporting, and has been a Pulitzer finalist three other times since 2000.
Last year, Johnston published the fruits of all that prize-winning reporting in his book Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich--and Cheat Everybody Else. A bestseller and the winner of a 2004 Investigative Reporters and Editors award, the book documents how, over the last three decades, the tax system has been twisted to subsidize the wealthiest 1 percent of the country. Johnston recently talked to City Pages about the book, the damage this reverse Robin Hood scheme is doing to the other 99 percent of Americans, and about the perils posed to democracy by the growing inequalities of the system.
Read the article here.
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