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TWO GRIFTERS OFF TO SEIZE THE WORLD*  
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Robert Kuttner
February 7, 2025
The American Prospect
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_ Most fascist dictators have been more about ideology and absolute
power than about personal wealth. Trump and his crony Musk are at
least as interested in personal enrichment as they are in destroying
the deep state or the rule of law. _

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There have been so many lunatic forays in the past two weeks that the
idea of creating a U.S. sovereign wealth fund went by with too little
understanding or comment. Trump issued an executive order February 3
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the departments of Treasury and Commerce to study the idea and report
back in 90 days.

The order asking for a report is a lot of hot air. It’s just
Trump’s way of marking the territory and buying some time. But Trump
and Musk seem all too serious about the idea.

Several nations have such funds. They run the gamut from well operated
and clean (Norway) to personalized and corrupt (Malaysia, Saudi
Arabia), where the fund is used to enrich the supreme leader and his
cronies.

_MORE FROM ROBERT KUTTNER_
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Trump views the asset side of the federal ledger as something to be
monetized. The assets include $1.6 trillion in student debt, as well
as federal holdings of land and intellectual property. Scott Bessent,
the Treasury secretary, supports the idea and says federal assets,
including financial assets, are worth $5.7 trillion. The money could
go into the sovereign wealth fund, sometimes by securitizing the
assets.

A sovereign wealth fund capitalized in the trillions, and subject to
political control, could buy up everything from Trump crypto coins to
stock in Tesla and SpaceX. It could bail out real estate investments
from Trump and his cronies and underwrite the redevelopment of Gaza.
It would be a multitrillion-dollar personal slush fund.

Like so many of Trump’s schemes, Trump cannot legally create such a
fund by executive order. If he tries, this also will have to be
resolved by the courts.

WHAT’S INTERESTING IS THAT A PROPERLY governed sovereign wealth
fund, insulated from conflicts of interest, is far from a crazy idea.
Alaska has had a Permanent Fund since 1972, funded by royalties from
North Slope oil. Each year, dividends, well into the thousands of
dollars, go to every Alaskan man, woman, and child.

Peter Barnes has proposed a federal permanent wealth fund
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by a share of all innovations funded by the federal government, such
as breakthroughs underwritten by NIH, NSF, and DARPA. This would give
every American a second stream of capital income to complement wage
and salary income.

A more corrupt and politicized version of a state sovereign wealth
fund is the Texas Permanent School Fund, financed by oil and gas
royalties. Republican state officials have used the fund
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punish investments in solar and wind energy and to punish mutual funds
that invest in them.

In the context of Trump’s sovereign wealth fund proposal, Howard
Lutnick, Trump’s nominee to be commerce secretary, has suggested
that the government should get a share of government-funded inventions
that produced windfall profits for private grantees, such as COVID
vaccines. In a different context, that’s a lefty idea that could
help underwrite a shared wealth fund of the sort proposed by Peter
Barnes.

There’s a larger lesson here. Trump has proposed totally
out-of-the-box ideas, many of them illegal. Democratic presidents have
been far more reticent about breaking the mold. If a Democratic
president embraced the idea of a wealth fund for citizens, the idea
would suddenly become mainstream, and public debate would start asking
questions about why nearly all federally funded innovation is captured
for private windfall profit.

There’s another lesson. Most fascist dictators have been more about
ideology and absolute power than about personal wealth. Hitler was not
interested in getting filthy rich, nor was Mussolini, nor Franco.
Trump and his crony Musk are at least as interested in the corrupt use
of power for personal enrichment as they are in destroying the deep
state or the rule of law.

That ought to be a source of political vulnerability. It remains to be
seen whether any other Republicans care.

*Readers under, say, age 50 may not get the pun. It’s a play on
“two drifters, off to see the world,” from “Moon River,” which
was the theme song to the great 1961 Audrey Hepburn movie _Breakfast
at Tiffany’s_.

_Robert Kuttner is co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect,
and professor at Brandeis University’s Heller School._

_Used with the permission. The American Prospect, Prospect.org, 2024.
All rights reserved. Click here
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* Donald Trump
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* Elon Musk
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* Money in Politics
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* political corruption
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