An Engineered Collapse: How America Is Being Driven Toward Economic and Moral Ruin

 

An Engineered Collapse: How America Is Being Driven Toward Economic and Moral Ruin

by Germanico Vaca

Millions of Americans depend on Medicare not as a luxury, but as a lifeline. For older adults, it is the difference between dignity and destitution, between care and neglect. Yet instead of confronting the real structural crisis facing the United States, political leaders—most visibly Donald Trump—have chosen scapegoating over solutions, cruelty over mathematics, and authoritarian shortcuts over economic reality.

The numbers tell a story that political slogans cannot erase.

As of March 2024, 66.4 million people—nearly one in five Americans—are enrolled in Medicare, with roughly half in Original Medicare and nearly half in Medicare Advantage. Medicare spending reached $944.3 billion in 2022, accounting for 21% of total national health expenditures, and it continues to rise due to both increased enrollment and higher per-person costs. Households with Medicare beneficiaries now spend nearly twice the share of their income on healthcare compared to non-Medicare households.

This is not a temporary spike. It is a demographic inevitability.

Between 2010 and 2020, the population aged 65 and older grew by nearly 39%—over 15.5 million people. By 2025, almost 20% of the U.S. population—roughly 59.7 million people—were 62 or older, meaning already eligible or imminently eligible for Medicare. Since 2010, this age cohort has expanded by 43%, while the under-65 population has grown by a mere 2%.

This means fewer workers.
Fewer taxpayers.
And vastly higher obligations.

Now place this reality next to the fiscal situation Trump and his allies refuse to acknowledge:

• Over $1.1 trillion per year in interest payments on U.S. debt

• Annual federal deficits exceeding $2 trillion

• Medicare obligations approaching $2 trillion annually when fully accounted for in real economic terms

This is the context in which Trump claims that immigrants are “a burden.”

That claim is not merely false—it is economically illiterate.

The Immigrant Scapegoat Lie

While the U.S. faces a historic aging crisis and an unsustainable fiscal structure, Trump and the far right insist on attacking the very population that keeps the system alive.

Immigrants—documented and undocumented alike—are overwhelmingly of working age. They pay taxes. They consume locally. They stabilize labor markets. Conservative estimates show that undocumented immigrants alone contribute close to a trillion dollars in federal, state, and local taxes over time, much of it through payroll taxes they will never fully recover in benefits.

They spend nearly all their income on food, housing, transportation, and clothing, injecting money directly into the domestic economy. They harvest crops, build homes, staff hospitals, care for the elderly, and keep inflation from spiraling even faster by filling labor shortages that native demographics can no longer meet.

Remove them—and the consequences are immediate and severe.

Farmers are already going bankrupt.
Construction projects are stalling.
Healthcare staffing shortages are deepening.
Entire regional economies are destabilizing.

This is not theory. It is happening now.

Project 2025: Authoritarianism Disguised as Policy

Despite public denials, Trump’s actions align word-for-word with the agenda laid out in Project 2025—a plan not designed to fix immigration, but to expand executive power, dismantle constitutional protections, and rule by fear.

Under this agenda:

• Asylum is effectively abolished at the border.

• Legal immigration pathways are slashed.

• Local police are coerced into federal immigration enforcement or threatened with loss of funding.

• Mass detention camps—including tent facilities—are authorized.

• Millions of people with lawful status are made deportable overnight.

• TPS holders—over 800,000 people who cannot safely return home—are placed at risk.

• Protections for trafficking victims (T visas) and crime victims (U visas) are eliminated.

• Children are detained by dismantling the Flores settlement.

• Mixed-status families are barred from housing and education support.

• Due process is discarded under vague “mass migration” declarations.

This is not law enforcement.
It is state coercion.

The Department of Homeland Security is granted unchecked discretion, the military is positioned for domestic immigration enforcement, and constitutional limits are treated as obstacles rather than safeguards. The use of “acting” officials without Senate confirmation consolidates power in the Executive branch while silencing democratic oversight.

This is authoritarianism by design.

The Economic Absurdity at the Core

At the exact moment the United States desperately needs more taxpayers, more workers, and more contributors, Trump’s agenda removes them.

It shrinks the tax base.
It accelerates Medicare insolvency.
It worsens debt dynamics.
It increases inflationary pressure.
It deepens labor shortages.
And it pushes the nation closer to financial collapse.

Blaming immigrants while the country drowns under debt interest, demographic decline, and exploding healthcare costs is not leadership—it is sabotage.

A Call to Action

America cannot deport its way out of an aging crisis.
It cannot imprison its way to solvency.
It cannot build prosperity on fear.

The solution is not cruelty—it is integration.
Not mass deportation—but legalization, taxation, and inclusion.
Not executive overreach—but constitutional governance.

A functional immigration system is not a moral luxury.
It is an economic necessity.

If the United States continues down this path—dismantling rights, shrinking its workforce, and empowering authoritarian control—it will not merely betray its values. It will engineer its own collapse.

This is the moment to choose:
Reality over propaganda.
Math over myth.
Democracy over authoritarian convenience.

The cost of ignoring this choice will be paid—not by immigrants—but by everyone.