As long as his incipient presidential campaign has collapsed, it probably comes easier for Chris Christie to propose major cuts to Social Security. But it’s notable that his approach is quite different from what President Bush proposed in 2005.
For a generation, Republican plans for cutting Social Security have fallen into two basic categories. The first is some form of privatization and phase-out of the program. On the surface, this wasn’t supposed to be cuts but rather phasing out the program and putting all the risk on individual recipients. But it was presented as basically a free lunch. As I noted at the time, this was basically total or partial elimination of the program with a plan to replace it with a sort of super charged 401k plan.
Second are various ways of changing the budgetary formulas to make them more ‘accurate’ but which have the practical effect of reduce that absolute dollar amounts recipients receive. Whether or not the formulas more or less accurately capture the true cost of living and expenses, they’re still cuts from the current levels.
Christie is basically doing just aggressive means testing, something much more straightforward and something which has been supported at various points by Republicans and some right-leaning Democrats.
Again, easy enough to do if your campaign is basically already dead in the water and highly unlikely to revive.
