A fireside chat with Lisa Conyers and Phil Harvey, co-authors of the book Welfare for the Rich, which details how many millionaires and billionaires secure and take advantage of government handouts, both for themselves and the companies they run. From subsidies, grants, tax credits, loan guarantees, price supports, to many other payouts, the book examines the countless ways the rich are able to take advantage of the system.
The conversation is moderated by Peter Coy, Secretary/Assistant Treasurer of the New York Financial Writers’ Association and the economics editor at Bloomberg Businessweek
Among the topics touched on are:
- Stadiums (The Sky-High Price of Big-League Dreams: State Subsidies for Stadiums, Movies and Mickey Mouse)
- The Farm Bill and Farm Subsidies (Unhealthy Harvest: Millionaire Farmers and the Hand that Feeds Them)
- Income inequality
- PPPs, Bailouts & the Stimulus (Why they say not so fast on big industry bailouts like the airlines and the coal industry.
- How to get the economy moving again
Lisa Conyers is co-author, with Phil Harvey, of The Human Cost of Welfare. She is a nonpartisan consultant to private clients and think tanks, focusing on economics and public policy issues. Her passion is explaining complex economic issues for the layman. She also consults on films and documentaries on economics and free markets, and is a sought-after ghostwriter. She also consults on political campaigns.
Her writing has been published in the New York Daily News, the Los Angeles Times, and the Huffington Post, among other venues, and she has appeared frequently on radio and TV to discuss economic and social issues.
Phil Harvey is an entrepreneur who has founded a thriving business, a philanthropist who has created several important nonprofit organizations, and the author of five books.
He is chairman and a major shareholder of Adam & Eve, a mail order business that sells products for a better sex life. As a philanthropist, Harvey became concerned about the problems of global hunger and lack of family planning during a stint with the international charity CARE in India. Harvey used the profits from Adam & Eve to found DKT International, which provides family planning and HIV/AIDS prevention programs in more than twenty countries in the developing world. Harvey also co-founded Population Services International, which today operates in almost 70 countries. Harvey’s combination of business and social interests led Mother Jones magazine to dub him a “hardcore philanthropist.”
Between 1977 and 2007, Harvey engaged in several successful legal battles with the United States and New York State governments in defense of First Amendment rights. These inspired Harvey’s book The Government vs. Erotica: The Siege of Adam & Eve (Prometheus, 2001). In 2010, he founded the DKT Liberty Project, which works to support individual freedom, civil liberties, and free speech. The DKT Liberty Project has filed numerous friend-of-the-court briefs supporting free speech rights, and Harvey has been active in campaigns to decriminalize drug use and roll back the war on drugs. He also serves on the board of the National Coalition Against Censorship. And in 2019, he participated in the group’s Open Discussion project, debating current issues such as democracy and immigration at Washington, D.C.’s Politics and Prose bookstore.
Harvey’s other books include Let Every Child Be Wanted: How Social Marketing Is Revolutionizing Contraceptive Use Around the World; Government Creep: What Government Is Doing That You Don’t Know About; and The Human Cost of Welfare: How the System Hurts the People It’s Supposed to Help. He is also the author of a novel, Show Time, a psychological thriller that offers a chilling satire of reality television
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