In his speech in New Hampshire Tuesday, Chris Christie proposed pushing back the age at which one becomes eligible for social security and Medicare for future retirees from 67 to 69.
Last year, Christie took $2.4 billion from the state’s pension fund to balance the budget, calling his decision “not only the best but the only decision we’re left with” to solve the state’s $2.7 billion, two-year deficit.
Think Progress point out that the budget woes were created largely by Christie’s favors for the wealthy:
But the circumstances that left Christie in that hole didn’t arise on their own. He created them by spending $2.1 billion on business tax subsidies over the first three years of his tenure and by overseeing “alternative investments” of pension money with hedge funds and other high-fee money managers who pocketed a combined $1.2 billion in fees that would otherwise have gone into the state’s pension funds over the past year alone.
The escalation of tax breaks hasn’t brought prosperity to the state. New Jersey ranks48th in private sector job growth since 2010, according to the Star-Ledger, tied with Mississippi. It has recovered a little under 40 percent of the total jobs it lost to the Great Recession, while neighboring New York (122 percent) and Pennsylvania (81 percent) have performed far better, according to the paper.