Stephen Moore, formerly of the Club For Growth, is on board Project 2025. That’s not good news.
Stephen Moore, a conservative economist whose controversial remarks about women cost him a seat on the Federal Reserve board in 2019, is now co-author of a plan to radically reform the US treasury as part of Project 2025, a vast rightwing effort to advance radical policy proposals for Donald Trump’s possible White House return.
“Project 2025 is all about forcing a far-right agenda on to everyday Americans,” said Tony Carrk, the executive director of the progressive watchdog Accountable.US, which produced an extensive report on Moore’s views and positions.
“So it’s no wonder they tapped a notorious social security opponent like Stephen Moore to help write their policy schemes.”
Moore, Carrk said, had “dedicated his career to slashing social security benefits and taxes for billionaires”.
Trump always says he will protect SS and medicare but it’s just a campaign promise. He doesn’t give a daman about any of that, he just knows that it’s popular and wants to pretend that he will erase all national debt through his silly tariff schemes and “growth” to appease the rubes. The Big Money Boyz are fine with that as long as they get their tax cuts.
But people like Moore really, really want to do it and it Trump isn’t running again he’ll probably let them do whatever they want:
Moore remains loyal to Trump but in the past has advocated for privatising social security, which he has called a “Ponzi scheme”, and told students they should march on the Capitol and burn their social security cards…
Moore’s co-authors are William L Walton, a private equity investor, and David R Burton, an economic policy expert. The three authors identify social security as a program relevant to treasury reform, including it in “issues of concern” that “cut across multiple parts of treasury or other governmental agencies”.
Elsewhere, Jonathan Berry, who was chief counsel to the Trump transition in 2016-17 and led the regulatory section of the Department of Labor in the Trump administration, notes the potential for privatisation of social security, writing: “Existing statutory language in the Social Security Act does not prohibit non-public organisations from administering the programme.”
Moore is now being bankrolled by Leonard Leo:
Moore went on to advise Trump during the Covid pandemic. Now, as well as writing books and providing analysis for Fox News, he is attached to a range of rightwing groups – he is a Heritage Foundation fellow; the senior economist at FreedomWorks; and chair of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity (CUP).
Moore co-founded CUP in 2015 with the billionaire Steve Forbes, the economist Larry Kudlow (later Trump’s chief economic adviser) and Arthur Laffer, an economist and pundit who advised Ronald Reagan and Trump and to whom Trump gave the presidential medal of freedom.
The Accountable.US report details donations of at least $1.77m to CUP from DonorsTrust, a rightwing group not required to reveal the names of its donors.
“A principled philanthropic partner for conservative and libertarian donors” in its own words, but “the right’s dark-money ATM” in the words of Mother Jones magazine, DonorsTrust has links to the Koch network and Leonard Leo, two dominant figures in rightwing political funding.
All those people are staunch opponents of social security and medicare. If they can finally get their hands on all that money for their rich benefactors to play with in the markets, you can believe they will do it. Privatization has always been their goal and we’re far enough from the calamity of 2008 now (and the markets are booming) so they almost surely think people have forgotten what can happen when your entire nest egg is in the market. I could happen.