There are many ways to describe the GOP policy of running up the debt and then using it to justify draconian cuts in public spending. Bruce Bartlett called the Two-Santa Theory. I prefer a more direct and honest description: Burning down the country to collect the insurance money.
It’s a really simple scheme when you look at it. You run up the debt via tax cuts targeted at your donors. You privatize everything, transferring it to the same donors who got bags of cash in the form of tax giveaways and subsidies. You then loot the nation’s insurance fund, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid to undo the damage of the tax cuts.
Trump’s executive order is a new take on this scheme: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/memorandum-deferring-payroll-tax-obligations-light-ongoing-covid-19-disaster/
Here he is just ceasing to collect payroll taxes, which directly fund social security. This is being done without any cuts to spending or new taxes to offset them; simply to decrease the funds social security will have available to meet future obligations. He knows damn well that most tax payers will not be able to pay six months or a year of deferred payroll taxes so he is counting on the next administration to have to pay for this with cuts when the bill comes due.
This is burning the insurance money to keep the country burning.
