Posted on 04/16/2015 6:10:40 AM PDT by shortstop
Chris Christie can be Hillary Clinton’s running mate.
They’re both liberals, they’re both clueless, they’re both egocentrics.
And they’re both wrong.
We’ll talk about Hillary another day.
Today’s subject is Christie.
Specifically, his announced intent to “take on” entitlements.
He rightly points out that entitlements consume some 70 percent of the federal budget and are a fiscal and social cancer that is destroying America.
Entitlements – the “rights” of the welfare state – oblige the taxpayer to fund a limitless number of people receiving a limitless number of dollars over a limitless series of programs.
Entitlements are automatic theft, redistribution on auto pilot.
And they need to be taken on.
By which I mean gutted.
And Chris Christie is saying so.
Unfortunately, that’s where he stops making sense.
Because after throwing out the warning about entitlements, he then immediately offers a suggestion that will do almost nothing to pare back entitlements, and which is nothing more than another redistribution.
More specifically, it will amount to a lifelong tax of more than 6 percent of a person’s gross income.
Strange fact: Christie claims to be a Republican.
Here are the details.
Christie says that Social Security retirement benefits should be means tested – that’s fancy talk for “denied to successful people.”
He says that if you, in retirement, make more than $80,000 a year, you should have our Social Security pension reduced. That sliding scale will hit zero if you make $200,000 a year in retirement income.
The populist – by which I mean “dumb person” – would say that that makes sense. People making that much money don’t need a pension, so we should strip it from the greedy bastards and give it to some worthy recipient – by which I mean “lazy person.”
But that would be bunk.
Because Social Security is supposed to be insurance, a retirement annuity which you buy at the exorbitant price of 6 and a half percent of your gross income.
How much you pay in, therefore, depends on how much you make; and the more you make, the more you pay in.
So Chris Christie would say to the people who have paid in the most, “Go screw yourself.”
That would be kind of like theft.
Which makes me think he’d be happier as a Democrat.
It’s ironic that recent executive orders will qualify many millions of currently illegal aliens for a Social Security pension, even if they are newly arrived in the United States.
So, in the Obama/Christie world – are they still dating? – you tell someone who’s paid a small fortune all his life that he gets nothing, while you tell newcomers who’ve essentially paid nothing that they go to the front of the line.
Explain to me again how that makes sense.
Let’s look at one of these evil rich people.
Take a hypothetical guy named Joe.
Let’s say Joe went to BOCES in high school and learned the rudiments of plumbing. And that after graduating, and marrying the girl next door, he went into business as a plumber.
Jim and his truck and his tools, all brought to bear on your toilet.
Say he works hard.
Say he eventually builds up enough business to buy another truck and hire another guy.
Say five years later he does that again, and five years after that adds a third employee.
And maybe after 40 years of that he’s got a pretty nice little local plumbing business set up.
And when he retires, instead of selling it, he keeps it, but hires a manager to run it.
Should Joe get a Social Security retirement check?
As a self-employed man and a business owner, he didn’t pay 6-plus percent in Social Security tax, he paid 15 percent.
That’ll teach those darned entrepreneurs.
Let’s say he paid 15 percent of his gross for 40 years, and retires eventually, a manger running his company, with the company returning to him about $90,000 a year.
Should he get a Social Security check?
Chris Christie says no.
Common sense and fairness say yes.
Chris Christie would take a return you’ve been promised your entire life, strip you of it, and turn every penny you ever paid into FICA into a secondary income tax.
To me, that doesn’t sound very Republican.
It sounds kind of Marx.
It sounds like the traditional socialist strategy to reward the failed and punish the successful, to incentivize sloth and penalize industry, to punish what should be rewarded and reward what should be punished.
And we don’t need Christ Christie for that.
We’ve got Hillary for that.
Hillary and her entire Democratic Party.
My advice to Chris Christie is, if he wants to be the Republican presidential candidate, maybe he should talk and think like a Republican.
Instead of like one more East Coast liberal.
Here at FR, he’s a dead candidate as far as any semblance of winning any nomination. Even in the latest blather in the MSM he isn’t much more than some diversion they use to muddy the mix.
I keep hoping the exploratory committee Bush formed is for exploring running against Hitlery in the Democratic primary!
Was watching last night when they played a clip of Christie saying that if he runs, he’ll beat Hillary. I was wondering if he had come out of the closet and switched parties and I hadn’t heard about it. With his new SS proposals, he’d never make it through the Republican primaries.
I can’t name one conservative I know who will vote for Christie or Bush. If they run against Clinton they will get trounced.
Time for a REAL CHANGE. No more Bush’s, Clinton’s, or RINO’s.
Social security, like veterans’ benefits, is not an entitlement. Both are earned for work done.
What Christie proposes is changing the rules after the game has been played.
We’re forced into that damn Ponzi scheme called Social Security, and someone like the plumber in the above article would probably have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars into SS over the course of his working lifetime.
And Christie wants to steal it.
Stay in New Jersey, Christie.
You (we) are playing words with progressives’ sense of
F A I R N E S S
It don’t matter the past, they look at the here and now.
Say, If you have 100 bucks and the next 5 guys have none, now is it fair? Shouldn’t you doll out 50 bucks, so these 5 other worthy chaps can get 3 bucks each? (Twenty bucks pocketed by the “progressive genius” who proposed of the scheme and have others doing the hand out, while making absolutely sure that the 3 bucks some one gets is all due to this progressive genius (hint:Obama:hint))
/note: scale of money exchange may not reflect the reality
How to redistribute the wealth. Let me count the ways.
Unfortunately there are quite a few Republicans out there advocating means testing SS. Talk about unfair! I guess they rely on the fact that most people don’t know that it is not a tax for general good, it is an individual retirement insurance, or it was supposed to be. The wealthy never get back what they paid into it as it is, and the poor get much more.
To mimic him:
It's atrocious.
Unreadable.
He uses these little sentences, in rapid succession.
He think it adds impact.
It doesn't.
It's distracting.
And annoying.
Many people comment on the so called entitlements.The one thing that isn’t brought up is,too many people getting Social Security that never paid into it.Too many people getting Medicaid,who with the help of Charleton Doctors,are qualifying for Medicaid when unemployment benefits ran out.The big one,how many of these benefits are going to illegals,or the SS,Medicaid,Medicare funds being siphoned
off for other things !
CC is a typical NJ RINO but he is way way way too conservative to be a NJ democrat or a democrat VP running mate.
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