Hugh Hewitt was handicapping the 2024 GOP Primary on Thursday and put Chris Christie in his top four. Now I’m a Chris Christie fan going way back… he was Ron DeSantis before Ron DeSantis…. a beefy straight-talker with a funny accent who liked to throw haymakers at reporters. What’s not to love?
One of the policy reasons I liked him was that I’ve been a Deficit Hawk my whole life and Christie was the only one in the race willing to talk about the fact that we were (and are) spending ourselves into oblivion. As it turned out, Christie was the wrong man with the wrong issue at the wrong moment. There was once a constituency for smaller government and lower spending in this country, but that constituency is long gone and was, perhaps, already gone by the time the 2016 electoral cycle rolled around. If Trump ever menitoned Deficits or the Debt in his four years in the White House I missed it. At any rate, I never got to vote for Chris, he too was long gone by the time the California primary came my way.
But if he’s back, as Hugh seems to think he may be, then we may need his Deficit Hawkishness more than ever with a budget north of 7 Trillion dollars and a National Debt headed to the moon (Alice!).
With that in mind, here’s a piece I wrote for an older version of The Continental Congress, right after Christie announced his signature policy on reforming Social Security on Hugh’s Show… which still needs to be done, by the way….
(Also, take note of what the National Debt total was when I wrote this a mere four years ago… yikes!)
CHRIS CHRISTIE IS RIGHT ON SOCIAL SECURITY
This will probably lose me some fans, so I’m going to ask both of you to please remain calm as you read this and hear me out…
Christie is proposing that we means test folks making a certain amount of post-retirement income out of Social Security payments. I think he’s right.
But, but George, I paid into the system all my life, it’s my money, I should get it back… WITH INTEREST!!! Yes, I agree, in theory. Look, if it were up to me I would abolish the entire system on the basis that it’s theft in the first place. But the system is the system, so we’re stuck with it for now.
Know what else we’re stuck with? 19 trillion dollars in debt. I don’t think we can ever pay that back, but what we definitely can’t do is continue to make that number bigger, forever and ever.
We just can’t. It will literally destroy the nation eventually. Maybe not tomorrow. Maybe not next year, but someday.
And the only way we can stop that number from growing is to cut. Cut as much as we can. Cut EVERYTHING… if we can.
There can’t be any sacred cows. Everything has to be cut, across the board… yes, your pet project too. I don’t care what it is.
Yes, that too… everything.
We either do this voluntarily, right now, or reality will do it for us eventually… and it won’t ask for permission (or even our input). And while we might be able to get away with just a 5% cut across the board today, reality may impose a 10%, or 20%, or 50% cut ten years from now.
So we can play the “not in my backyard” game if we want. We can bitch and complain and argue that this or that ONE THING can never be cut. But there’s a big reality check waiting for us just over the horizon. And we’d better do something about it right now, before it swamps us all.
Christie’s idea is a good first step.