Yahoo! national political columnist Matt Bai – a former staff writer for Newsweek and The New York Times Magazine – wants to be impressed that Gov. Chris Christie is proposing Social Security reforms as he visits New Hampshire and flirts with a presidential campaign. "Chris Christie bets on bold" is his headline.
But Bai chided Christie for failing to raise the cap on Social Security payroll taxes, which would end the fiction that taxpayers are just contributing to their own retirement through the bloated federal government. Raising taxes? Bai said it creates “speaking-in-tongues madness” on the Right:
The one very sensible cost-saving measure that Christie doesn’t include in his plan, notably, is the progressive idea to lift the “cap” on payroll taxes, so that the top percent of American earners pay more than a fraction of their wages into the system. Here Christie falls short of most reform proposals, but it’s not hard to see why; raising any tax creates a kind of speaking-in-tongues madness among the activists inside his party.
Christie would also end the fiction of getting all your money back from Social Security: “seniors earning $80,000 and up would begin to see their benefits shaved on a sliding scale. If you were a single senior earning $200,000, your benefits would disappear entirely.”
Naturally, Bai glossed over the long-standing New Deal fictions of a save-for-your-own-retirement plan, and how liberals have never wanted to acknowledge this whole game was income redistribution – and over the last few decades, a redistribution from poorer young people to wealthier retirees. Instead, Bai pretended that Christie is taking it back to where FDR meant it to be:
What Christie is proposing is that Americans agree to restructure Social Security, 80 years after it was first enacted, to make it exactly what its staunchest defenders have always claimed it is: an actual insurance policy. If you need the money, you get it back. If you don’t, you don’t — or at least not the whole amount.
Bai somehow completely forgot that Republicans might still be angry at Christie for hugging and mugging with President Obama after Superstorm Sandy in the closing days of the 2012 campaign and snottily dismissing Mitt Romney -- perhaps trying to insure his own run in 2016. "A recent CBS News poll found that 42 percent of Republican voters wouldn’t even consider voting for him — not after that whole bridge fiasco and a bunch of smaller eruptions having to do with lavish travel and awkward man-hugs."
