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    Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You with the Bill)
    Unavailable
    Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You with the Bill)
    Unavailable
    Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You with the Bill)
    Audiobook (abridged)6 hours

    Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You with the Bill)

    Published by Penguin Random House Audio

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    The bestselling author of Perfectly Legal returns with a powerful new exposé.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateDec 27, 2007
    ISBN9781429592284
    Unavailable
    Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You with the Bill)

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    Reviews for Free Lunch

    4/5

    64 ratings5 reviews

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    • 4/5
      I think pretty much everyone believes that rich people use power and influence to become richer (at the expense of poorer people, generally). However, I do not think most of us think about this issue very often. It's not until you read a book like this that the real travesty hits home and you realize how bad the issue really is. It's not about successful people becoming more successful (I don't have a problem with that). It's about successful people taking advantage of taxpaying citizens and our government allowing them to do it for the most part.Reading a book like this strongly reinforces the need to elect representatives who will fight this kind of injustice and insure that everyone is treated equally under the law.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      I need some heavy doses of liver-destroying acetaminophen after reading this. This is a sampling of how the rabble that makes up the lower 90% of our population gets screwed over by big corporations and ultra-rich peeps who have, mainly during the last three decades, figured out the mechanisms to put tax dollars to work for their bank accounts. I was familiar with such aspects as subsidies to big box stores and professional sports franchises and the legalized gambling know as hedge funds. But by no means did I anticipate the sheer magnitude and obscene figures and stats attached such issues – and I’m a pretty cynical bastard at that! Additionally the stories regarding HMOs, deregulation of electrical utilities, and the home security companies tend to raise one’s neck hair. I fortunately shaved mine off before reading this, but to be quite frank – this is some fucked-up stuff!This is quite the page-turner. As the author is a journalist, there’s some of the expected sensationalism and there’s a certain journalistic paucity of supporting notes. Nonetheless, the various figures are apparently documented and where some guesswork is involved, the author makes this clear. It’s all pretty disturbing.I suppose I’ll no longer respond with a baffled smirk when a friend threatens to move to Canada, believing, as we’re programmed to do, that Canada is not really in the same league as the US. After reading this – as well as some others – I’ll now offer a high five, Montreal restaurant recommendations, and an synopsis of mid-century Toronto architecture as studies and stories revolving around income disparity, health care systems, and various definitions of “opportunity“ show that, indeed Canada is not in our league… Mexico and Russia are.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      The most important book I've read since I started reviewing books on Library Thing is The Shock Doctrine, by Naomi Klein. Free Lunch may be the second most important book, and both of these are my top picks for books the next President should take to the White House (a concept stolen from the blog for the PBS show Bill Moyers' Journal). Free Lunch is an expose by a reporter with over 30 years experience, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist named David Cay Johnston. He details many of the ways the government has, since 1980, given advantages to the wealthy, especially the super wealthy, at the expense of the rest of us. From the sports team investors and other businesses that get subsidies and tax breaks that destroy the ability of local governments to provide services, to the illegality of the government negotiating for the best drug prices, to the deregulation of electric power generation in a way that caused prices to soar while services grew worse, to the horrors of non-profit health care becoming profit-making centers, those with the power to regulate and appropriate have contributed to income inequality as great as it was before the Great Depression.This book complements well Paul Krugman's Conscience of a Liberal, although that book was a history of the political economy of the U.S. since the Great Depression while this one is on abuses since 1980... yet they overlap in places. In particular, they both tell the same story of the health care industry. Johnston says, "Another study estimated that two-thirds of the administrative costs of for-profit insurers are spent on care denial...Americans spend nearly 6 times the average of what 13 other countries do on health care..." We spend so much on health care so that insurers can REFUSE to pay for health care for those they insure.If you only read two books this year, my suggestion would be The Shock Doctrine and Free Lunch.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Johnston packs a lot of eye-opening data into this book, taking on major league sports, eminent domain abuse, health care, the laws touted to taxpayers as “deregulation”, and more. He calls upon both Adam Smith and the Bible to damn both Democrats and Republicans that have forsaken their duty to the people. There are many surprises— for instance, I had no idea that baseball was exempt from antitrust law and that big-league sports were not, overall, profitable without subsidies and tax breaks.I had thought that I had accumulated enough cynicism in the past 8 years that I was pretty much tapped out on moral outrage, but this book managed to blow oxygen on the few embers I have left. This book makes it abundantly clear that for all the talk in Washington of the glories of the free market, we have nothing resembling one here in the United States.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      Fairly good review of some of the "rules" in our system that skews the economy toward those with the money and the power. Good examples