In other words, he lied to the voters because he’s trying to salvage his presidential fantasy:
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie said he’ll reverse course on promised pension contributions this year and next, cutting back to balance the budget after revenue fell short of his goals by as much as $875 million.
This year’s payment of $696 million will be less than half the planned $1.58 billion, Christie told reporters in Trenton. For fiscal 2015, the payment will be $681 million, less than one-third of the record $2.25 billion he had proposed.
New Jersey faces a cash shortage next month, with $2.6 billion due on tax- and revenue-anticipation notes, or TRANs, and just $2.2 billion on hand. The 51-year-old Republican, a potential 2016 presidential candidate, has refused to raise taxes to remedy three straight years of missed revenue.
“This is a political decision — it’s all about 2016,” Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute in West Long Branch, said by telephone. “Now that he’s not the odds-on favorite of the moderate wing of the Republican Party, he’s got to win conservative voters. He’s got to do everything in his power not to raise taxes.”
So Christie (the state of New Jersey) will fall about $3 billion dollars short in contributions to the pension fund. That can’t be good for those who retire at some point in the future and get short changed in their pension payments. Nobody can really believe that the bean counters didn’t know that the state budget would run almost a billion dollars in the red. They knew it and they intended to do exactly what Christie is doing. Kill the pension fund. This was a calculated plan on Christie’s part. “I will not raise taxes” is how Christie gets out of the intentional mess that he put New Jersey’s pensioners in. For the short term. Republicans pull this crap all the time.
Your analysis, IM, reminds me of the stories I hear from my Brazilian friends in Rio. I found it hard to believe that the female students of that country only receive 3/4 hours of schooling for 2/3 days a week. This leaves these young girls with two job skills: prostitution (which is legal), and strippers and waitresses which is also legal, but renders them all as elderly maids for the rich years later. Bottom line: they have zero ability to think critically or to use reasoning skills as a way to predict outcomes. Now, all this is true, but, I’m not really talking about Brazilian females because the same educational outcomes are just as true here in “The Greatest Country in The World”.
Check out Christie’s photo above.
He’s lost a chin or two.
The radical lap-band surgery is working, and in 6 more months or a year, he’ll be looking pretty durn good. (But perhaps barely recognizable, like fellow-Gop heavyweight Mike Huckabee after he shed a ton of weight.)
In any case, he’s gonna be a real babe magnet, a regular Mitt Romney or Rick Perry. But the smaller head and face will make his Pinocchio nose look even longer.