Two ways to look at this: (1) The Big Show has the courage that comes from knowing that he has no realistic chance at the 2016 GOP nomination; or (2) he doesn't really want to be POTUS but enjoys attracting attention to himself beyond the amused looks his enormous girth garners him.
Probably some of both:
Republican presidential hopeful Chris Christie proposed pushing back the age of eligibility for Social Security and Medicare for future retirees on Tuesday as part of a plan to cut deficits by $1 trillion over a decade, an approach he said would confront the nation's "biggest challenges in an honest way."
An honest but inadequate way, if he were to be...well, honest. Even if you buy the laughable fiction that current annual deficits are "only" half a trillion a year or so (and they're headed back up, BTW), "trimming" one fifth of that is like trying to dam a tsunami by sticking your finger in a dike. It's a noble, I suppose, but nonetheless meaningless gesture. A person can bleed to death in five minutes or ten, but in the end they're still going to be dead.
Kind of like Governor Christie's presidential ambitions.
In a speech in New Hampshire, site of the first 2016 presidential primary, the New Jersey governor also proposed cutting off Social Security benefits in the future for retirees with annual incomes of $200,000 or more.
Maybe he's calculating that seniors have become so small a portion of the presidential electorate that
he has little to lose by pissing them off with such a suggestion, even though they vote more consistently than any other demographic. Not a good calculation given continuing "gray" demographic trends.
He said seniors who wish to work after age 62 should be exempt from the payroll tax.
Which - take your pick - either cuts Social Security's already hopelessly inadequate revenue streams or - really, and - won't remotely assuage the geezer outrage of cutting off their benies, which even the otherwise staunchest conservative seniors insist upon and down that they've "earned" even though the benies they get come not from some mythical "account" they "paid into" for years, but from today's dwindling body of workers and employees, same as they got syphoned for the seniors of decades ago.
"Through its unwillingness to address our biggest challenges in an honest way, the Obama administration has put us on a perilous course for both our short-term and our long-term futures," Christie told the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at Saint Anselm College.
The Obama Regime is unwilling to address our biggest challenges in ANY way, because they want those "challenges" to remain unaddressed. That IS their policy, because exacerbating the status quo advances O's Cloward-Piven "fundamental transformation" revolutionary agenda.
"See, I think it's time to tell the truth about what we need to do in order to solve our problems and put our country back on the path to greater prosperity."
First of all, we have to be put back onto a path to ANY kind of prosperity before we can begin to talk about increasing it. Right now we're on the path to an even deeper economic depression, and looming economic collapse.
Second, Governor, if you want to tell the truth about what we need to do in order to solve our problems, you need to be talking about immediate privatization of ALL entitlements, which would necessarily include full repeal of ObamaCare. Otherwise you're not telling the truth and you're wasting everybody's time with these timid half-measures.
Which suggests to me that what this is is an attempt to straddle that gaping divide between what really must be done and what the electorate will tolerate. Which is not something that a morbidly obese RINO is physically or politically well-suited to do.
The proposal marked an attempt to establish Christie's deficit-cutting credentials in a race that has three other Republicans as declared presidential candidates, with more to come. Christie says he will decide in May or June whether to launch a campaign for the nomination.
He needn't bother, Even with the canary in the coal mine he set loose today, that nascent campaign is already stillborn. Which makes it so frustrating that he didn't really swing for the fences. At least the magnitude of our predicament could have been injected into the campaign debate, if only for a news cycle or two.
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