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Corporate Grift Plus A Sickening Dose Of Hypocrisy At Bobby's 'MAHA Summit'

Corporate Grift Plus A Sickening Dose Of Hypocrisy At Bobby's 'MAHA Summit'

If you’re a large company and you’d like some favorable treatment from, say, the Food and Drug Administration, you’re in luck. The MAHA Summit is open for business, baby.And by “open for business” I mean “available for bribes … er, corporate sponsorship.”

The MAHA Summit is ostensibly a private event run by whatever weirdos run MAHA events. But in reality, it’s just another way for corporations to buy access to this administration.

That’s why I can’t technically say that Walmart, OpenAI, Anthropic, and other enormous companies are bribing officials like Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Those behemoths are just footing the bill for the summit, which is totally different, right?

Look, why should President Donald Trump have all the fun and ill-gotten gains? Why can’t other officials fully lean in to opportunities for corruption?

The MAHA Summit has the same vibe as Trump’s crypto dinner grift, where massive purchases of Trump’s worthless crypto got people—specifically those in need of pardons and deregulation—a sit-down with Trump.

Or perhaps it’s the same vibe as Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy’s seven-month family field trip that was also somehow a reality show that was also of course “sponsored” by the very companies that Duffy regulates.

The MAHA Summit is “sponsored” by companies like Walmart, even though it’s essentially ultraprocessed foods central—a thing that MAHA ostensibly detests. Other sponsors include companies pimping psychedelic drugs and peptides, two of the hallmarks of MAHA wellness scumminess.

The summit also has a panel consisting of United Health and AHIP, an insurer trade group—because nothing says “Make America Healthy Again” like cozying up to insurers, right?.

The MAHA Summit folks aren’t even being subtle about this attempt to purchase face time and influence.

Bloomberg News reviewed the full menu of “sponsorship” options, topping at $300,000 for a speaking slot with “meaningful input on the panel composition and topic” and dinner with Kennedy and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz.

Honestly, I’d pay a substantial sum not to have dinner with those two.

Meanwhile, the Department of Health and Human Services is busy pretending that, somehow, the MAHA Summit sponsorship people went rogue and that department officials listed as speakers were “not involved in the planning or sponsorship activities” and were “not aware of the sponsorship arrangements.”

Okay well, that’s easy enough to solve. Just have Kennedy, Oz, and other officials make a public statement repudiating any existing sponsorships, confirming that there’s no grifty dinner and that there will be no corporate sponsors of this shindig—or simply saying that they won’t attend because it’s chock-full of conflicts of interest.

But we all know full well that none of that will happen.

Instead, what we have is a gross symbiosis, like medical device company ResMed Inc. being a prominent sponsor and having its chief medical officer appearing on a panel with the head of the National Institutes of Health.

Sadly, this really isn’t much different than last year’s MAHA Summit, where companies could do “exclusive networking” with FDA and NIH leaders, and the whole thing was an unholy mix of Trump health officials, biotech CEOs, and wellness grifters.

This year’s summit is just making the cash on the barrelhead, pay-to-play part more explicit.

Well, at least they’re no longer making us all pretend that this is government business as usual. The very slimmest of silver linings.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos

What Even Our Smartest Economists Get Wrong About The Debt

What Even Our Smartest Economists Get Wrong About The Debt

The $40 trillion debt point naturally prompted much griping among pundits, many of whom see their job as promoting hysteria in order to justify cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and other popular social programs. As is clear to anyone not on the payroll of the rich and very rich, the debt is overwhelmingly the result of tax cuts, mostly to high earners, put in place by Presidents Reagan, Bush II, and Trump.

Unfortunately, confusion on the debt can spread even among the sane. Paul Krugman and Jared Bernstein, two top-notch economists (also friends) had a discussion of the debt in a podcast posted on Saturday. At one point, they noted that interest rates have risen, creating a situation where the interest rate is higher than the rate of growth, which could lead to explosive debt growing ever larger as a share of GDP.

That’s all straightforward arithmetic, but the confusion stems from the reason they see interest rates as going higher. Part of the reason is Trump’s craziness, which we all recognize undermines confidence in the economy and the debt. However, part of the reason is the investment boom from building AI data centers.

While I agree that this is a big factor in pushing rates higher, the assumption motivating this investment is that there will be some massive payoff in the form of higher profits stemming from huge gains in productivity. If these gains in productivity materialize, then we will be far richer than current projections show, and growth will have far surpassed interest rates. In other words, no explosive debt problem. Also, if we grow an extra 10-20 percentage points over the next decade, it seems a bit silly to be whining about debt, a point I will come back to.

There is also the possibility (likelihood in my view) that the productivity gains do not materialize. In that scenario, the AI-related stocks will crash at some point, the boom will bust, and we will likely be looking at a serious recession. In that world, our problem will be boosting the economy back to full employment, not the deficit. And for those who care about such things, interest rates should again be very low.

It seems this is a point that Paul and Jared should have brought into their deficit/debt discussion. I’ll give them a whack on the wrist for missing this point, but come to the more general issue that is usually lost in the tirades about gigantic debt.

Government Debt Is Not a Measure of Generational Equity

It is just atrociously bad economics to imagine the debt is some sort of measure of generational equity. At the most basic level, who owns the debt? The deficit hucksters talk like we send interest on the debt to people on another planet. In fact, the vast majority of the debt is held by U.S. citizens and U.S. corporations. We pay the debt to ourselves.

It’s true that ownership of the debt hugely skews upward, so the interest is mostly paid to higher-income people. But we can tax it back. In fact, let’s take an extreme case and say we tax back 100% of the interest.[1] In that case, is the debt a burden on future generations? We will of course not tax back 100% of the interest, but we can and should have progressive income taxes. Which, if they are actually collected, will mean that much of the money paid in interest will go right back to the government. And if we apply progressive taxes more generally, we can certainly offset any negative impact that interest payments on the debt have on income distribution.

And for trivia buffs, the rich people who will collect the interest in 30-40 years are part of future generations, the rich part. The story is again a class issue, not a generational one.

Growth and the Debt

Faster economic growth reduces the burden of the debt in the sense that it makes interest payments smaller relative to the size of the economy. But the more important point is that, in principle, faster growth makes us richer.

If the economy grows 10 percent more (in real terms) over a decade than had been expected (imagine AI actually pays off), then we would be roughly $3.9 trillion richer in 2036 than is now projected. Suppose in this story we had to pay another $500-$600 billion a year (again, in real terms) in interest compared to what we do today. Would we have done some injustice to our kids with a faster growth and higher debt story? The size of the economy is what will determine the well-being of our kids, not the amount of debt owed by the government.

But GDP growth is not everything, especially when it leads to destruction of our environment, as we are seeing now as a result of global warming. It would take some pretty batshit crazy accounting to be concerned about the debt we are passing on to our kids, but not about the environmental destruction we have caused by our use of fossil fuels.

And this is not just destruction of the lands where people like to be able to hike, fish, or hunt. It is also very much dollar-and-cents damage. The recent wildfires in Spokane are estimated to have caused over $1 billion in property damage. The damage done by the fires in Los Angeles last year may have been as high as $250 billion (0.8% of GDP). With global warming leading to more and bigger fires, as well as more frequent and severe hurricane and flooding events, we will be seriously damaging the life prospects of future generations even if we were to pay off the national debt tomorrow.

Trumpian Corruption

I know I have said this before, but the point deserves to be constantly thrown in the face of the deficit hawks: Trump’s corruption poses an infinitely greater threat to economic stability than the $40 trillion debt. Trump has been given a green light by the Roberts Supreme Court to corrupt every agency in the country (except the Fed) to enhance his power and his pocketbook. As we have seen, this means having the Justice Department and FBI focus on prosecuting his political opponents. It means selling antitrust rulings to campaign contributors. It means allowing political allies to sell unsafe food and likely drugs.

Trump has also had the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency greenlight his new crypto bank and had the Securities and Exchange Commission look the other way on his insider trading. He even ordered the Census Bureau to cook up a nonsense report on non-citizen voting to claim that, somehow, he actually won the 2020 presidential election that he lost in a landslide. (That’s the Trumpian usage of the word, where he says he won the 2024 election in a “landslide.”)

Anyhow, these are the sorts of things that happen in “shithole countries,” not advanced economies expecting the trust of investors. With Trump continually pressing his corruption further and his supporters in Congress saying it’s all good, investors should fear putting their money in the United States even if we had zero debt. That might be too difficult for the deficit hawks to understand, but most of us have parents who taught us not to do business with crooks.

[1] I know, no one would hold bonds if we taxed back all the interest, but I’m making a point. Trade economists have often assumed in their modeling that we replace tariffs with lump-sum taxes to show the benefits of trade. Unlike tariffs, lump-sum taxes don’t create economic distortions. Lump-sum taxes also don’t exist in the world, but trade economists felt it useful to assume them to make a point.


Worrying About $40 Trillion In Debt?  Trump's Corruption Is A Far Worse Threat

Worrying About $40 Trillion In Debt?  Trump's Corruption Is A Far Worse Threat

Yesterday, I wrote that I was far more concerned about Donald Trump’s regime of rampant corruption than the $40 trillion debt. I had a lot of pushback from people telling me that the $40 trillion debt is actually a really big deal.

I’m used to people complaining that I don’t take debt and deficits seriously enough, so I guess I would be disappointed if my post didn’t prompt some criticism. Anyhow, this gives me the opportunity to explain again why I’m not especially troubled by the $40 trillion debt. I will also explain why people really should be hair on fire over Trumpian corruption.

Debt Needs to be Understood as Part of a Larger Economic Picture

We all know that $40 trillion is a really big number, but after we give it a big salute, the question is what does it mean for the economy and for our pocketbooks? Most of the debt discussion didn’t really do this, or at least do this in a way that makes much sense.

First, we should express the debt relative to the size of the economy. The $40 trillion debt is equal to about 125 percent of Gross Domestic Product. Arguably the more appropriate measure is the publicly held debt, which excludes bonds held by the Social Security trust fund and various other public funds. This is roughly $32 trillion, or just over 100 percent of GDP. That’s large, but the debt-to-GDP ratio was considerably larger just after World War II, and that didn’t prevent us from having the most prosperous quarter century in our history. It also didn’t have investors here and elsewhere fleeing the dollar and government debt.

If we needn’t be scared by the government debt, what about the trillion dollars (3.3 percent of GDP) that we are paying out each year in interest payments? That’s a good chunk of change, but it is worth putting on our thinking caps instead of panicking.

Donald Trump just proposed, and may well get, a defense budget for fiscal 2027 of $1.5 trillion, roughly five percent of GDP. The last Biden budget for 2025 called for spending $864 billion for the military. This means Trump wants us to spend $636 billion more for the military each year, roughly 2.0 percent of GDP, than we did under Biden.

Virtually everyone thought the level of military spending under Biden was fine to meet our defense needs. If the new real or imaginary enemies that Trump has us combatting requires spending another two percent of GDP on the military, how is that better than spending another two percent of GDP on interest on the debt?

To put this simply, there are a lot of people getting hysterical about spending 3.3 percent of GDP on interest, who were fine, or at least not equivalently alarmed about Trump’s plan to increase military spending by two percent of GDP. If we make enemies in the world that require us to spend another two percentage points of GDP on the military, that is at least as bad as spending another two percentage points of GDP on interest on the debt. But only the latter will get the deficit hawks excited

In the same vein, our decision to ignore global warming is imposing high costs in dealing with wildfires and flooding. Most likely this is not close to two percent of GDP on an annual basis, but if the current path continues, we might be there before too long. In any case, if we are worried about the ongoing burden on the economy, the additional spending required to deal with the problems created by climate change is every bit as much a burden as interest on the debt.

Also, if we’re being serious, we have to recognize that spending money is not the only way the government pays for things. It also issues patent and copyright monopolies to support innovation and creative work. The annual sums transferred as a result of these government-granted monopolies are easily over $1 trillion a year. In the case of prescription drugs and other pharmaceuticals alone, it is over $500 billion.

The idea that we should worry about the debt and the interest we pay on it, but ignore the higher prices we pay for drugs, medical equipment, software, and other products because of the government-granted monopolies is something only a policy pundit could take seriously. If we’ve paid off the government debt, but a whole range of items cost twice as much as they would in a free market because we gave out patent monopolies lasting a century, would our kids have reason to thank us? In that case, they don’t have to worry about paying interest on the debt, just about paying massive patent rents on everything they buy.

Trump Corruption Threatens the Dollar, not Government Debt

For more than a century, investors, both foreign and domestic, felt comfortable having their money in the United States because they knew it was governed by the rule of law. This meant, for example, if there was a contract dispute, they could reasonably expect it would be decided in a court based on the merits, not based on political connections. The same is true for regulatory rulings, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) ruling on corporate filings or the Federal Drug Administration’s (FDA) approval of drugs.

Under Trump, this is no longer true. If a company lied about its profits on its financial statements, investors could present evidence to the SEC and expect that it would impose sanctions if there was a solid case, but not under Trump. If the company is a big Trump contributor, it’s likely he will instruct the SEC to ignore the complaint or rule in favor of the perp.

The same applies with all the bureaucracies, as the Supreme Court has said Trump can tell them to do whatever he likes. The FDA can refuse to approve the drug of a company whose CEO has criticized him. The Federal Aviation Administration can refuse to recognize the safety of an airplane manufactured by a company that Trump dislikes.

The story goes on. Trump has a green light to use all parts of the government to punish companies and individuals that anger him and to favor those who hand him money.

This is an infinitely greater threat to the credit of the U.S. government and the strength of the dollar than the debt. That fact should be obvious to anyone who is not an elite pundit.

Dean Baker is a senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and the author of the 2016 book Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer. Please consider subscribing to his Substack.

The Only Promise Todd Blanche Can Honestly Make Is More Dishonesty

The Only Promise Todd Blanche Can Honestly Make Is More Dishonesty

Todd Blanche was Donald Trump's personal attorney, so it was natural that when he was elevated to attorney general, a journalist asked whether he would "pledge that the Justice Department will always act independently of the White House?"

The correct answer to such a question is obvious: The Justice Department and I are committed to the impartial administration of justice. We will always make prosecution decisions based solely upon the facts and the law after a fair evaluation of the evidence.

But Blanche said something a little different:

"No, I'm not going to pledge that. And no attorney general should ever pledge that. The president, I mean, if I were to pledge I will be independent of the White House, what that means is that if President Trump says, 'I want the Department of Justice to go after every violent criminal in this country,' which is what he has said, what you're saying to me is I should say, 'No, sir, I'm not going to do it.'"

What jumps out first about Blanche's answer is the blithe refusal even to mouth (however disingenuously) the expected platitude. This is the Trumpian way. They don't just break the rules behind closed doors; they shatter the rules in broad daylight. It's not enough, for example, that the Trump Justice Department is denying resources to the team that investigates and prosecutes foreign corrupt practices; Trump issued an executive order pausing all such prosecutions. So it's not news that Trump's new attorney general will fail to seek impartial justice, but the refusal to even feign regard for impartial justice is new.

The substance of Blanche's justification is also fatuous. Pledging to act independently of the White House doesn't mean acting in every instance in direct opposition to the president. That's absurd and it's not what independence requires. Nor could the president order the attorney general to "go after every violent criminal in this country," since more than 98% of violent crimes are state offenses, not federal ones, and in any case the combined forces of the state and federal governments don't have the resources to go after every violent criminal.

So much for deflection. The coffee-spitting moment came later, when Blanche was asked whether he would carry out an order that "crossed a legal or ethical line" and he proclaimed, "The president will never ask me to do something unethical or legal — or illegal. He never has. He never will."

Let's let the Freudian slip pass, but in fact the president had demanded that the Justice Department do something unethical that very week — namely, reconsider the decision to drop spurious vandalism charges against David Hearn. Jeanine Pirro's own motion to the court acknowledged that the original indictment was based upon false information provided by the Department of the Interior.

Nevertheless, Trump fumed that Pirro had "choked." This week, we learned that she was convening a special grand jury for some unknown purpose. If I were Hearn, I'd keep my lawyer close.

And that perversion of justice is only a ripple in the flood of plainly politicized acts and forbearances by this administration. This is a president who sent a DM to his attorney general demanding the prosecution of his political opponents. It's hard to think of how you could more comprehensively upend the idea of blind justice.

Trump's apologists do have a valid point when they note that the Manhattan district attorney's case against Trump in the Stormy Daniels case was also a form of lawfare. I said at the time that the case was flimsy and almost certainly would never have been brought if Trump were not the target. Trump's flagrant lawbreaking did present a quandary: How do you hold him responsible for his crimes without unintentionally validating the idea in the minds of his supporters that all justice is corruptly motivated?

There are no easy answers. Still, the Bragg prosecution was a local case, not the federal government seeking to punish a political foe. Ditto for the civil case Letitia James brought. At the federal level, Attorney General Merrick Garland was actually extremely reluctant to pursue federal charges against Trump despite the gravity of his conduct before and on January 6. It was only after Trump announced his reelection bid that Garland felt compelled to appoint a special prosecutor (precisely to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest).

Nor is it the case that President Joe Biden's administration used the Justice Department to settle political scores. To repeat, Garland was widely criticized for moving slowly against Trump's obvious lawbreaking in the Mar-a-Lago documents case as well as the January 6 insurrection. One can understand his hesitation.

One administration prosecuting another opens the possibility of a dangerous tit-for-tat, but whatever your view about the wisdom of going slow against Trump, it's preposterous to "whatabout" this. Under Garland's leadership, the department brought indictments against Rep. Henry Cuellar, Sen. Bob Menendez, Rep. T.J. Cox, Illinois Speaker Michael Madigan, Mayor Eric Adams (and we know how that turned out when Trump returned), Mayor Andrew Gillum, and Hunter Biden — all Democrats.

Trump's second-term Department of Justice, by contrast, has been a nonstop cavalcade of corruption, featuring blatantly political prosecutions, attempted prosecutions or investigations of Jerome Powell, Lisa Cook, Mark Kelly, Miles Taylor, Christopher Krebs, James Comey, "sandwich guy," Adam Schiff, Letitia James, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, Alex Padilla, John Brennan, John Bolton, Sean Dunn, Ras Baraka, Jacob Frey, anti-ICE protesters in Minnesota including the widow of Renee Good, and many more.

Biden made poor decisions in pardoning his family at the end, but that was trivial compared with the mass pardons for the January 6 criminals, the pardons for cronies, donors, other corrupt public figures, the firings of any official who participated in the January 6 or Mar-a-Lago investigations, the kid-glove treatment for Ghislaine Maxwell, and of course, the putrid attempt to create a $1.7 billion slush fund for so-called victims of lawfare along with a get-out-of-jail-free card for Trump and his insatiable family regarding past tax evasion.

The aptly named Blanche (because he should, but doesn't, blush) was along for all of it. He personally visited Maxwell in prison and has yet to provide an explanation for that highly unusual visit, nor for her promotion to a more comfortable prison. He was at the Department of Justice as 3,400 lawyers resigned in protest rather than engage in the kinds of unethical and unprofessional conduct Pam Bondi and Blanche were demanding. He has defended with a straight face James Comey's indictment for threatening the president with an Instagram photo of seashells.

This ethical flexibility was enough to make even some Republican senators hesitate about confirming him. But in the end, all but Collins and Murkowski voted yes, presumably because they fear that if it's not Blanche it will be someone even worse. Thus does Trump extort his party — by threatening to get even dirtier.

But this tactic only succeeds because of learned helplessness by Republican office holders. In fact, when Trump gets pushback, he backs down. Ask Iran. Or consider the first utterly horrific attorney general candidate he proposed, Matt Gaetz. Enough Republicans balked that Trump withdrew his name. He didn't nominate someone even worse after that (admittedly a tall order). He went with Pam Bondi, a smidge less awful.

It seems the tactic of standing up to Trump is just crazy enough to work. But, no, the GOP has not learned that lesson. They've chosen spinelessness instead, and even after a decade of this, I still cannot understand why.

Mona Charen is policy editor of The Bulwark and host of the "Beg to Differ" podcast. Her new book, Hard Right: The GOP's Drift Toward Extremism, is available now.

Reprinted with permission from Creators


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