Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) took aim at New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s (R) proposal to make dramatic changes to Social Security.
“I don’t know why Republicans want to insult Americans by pretending they don’t understand what their Social Security program and Medicare program is,” Huckabee said Friday, according to The Weekly Standard. He was responding to a question about Christie’s proposed cuts to Social Security. Christie also called on gradually raising the national retirement age.
Besides Christie, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) have both signaled support (albeit vaguely) for some kinds of cuts to entitlement programs. But not Huckabee.
He said his answer is “not just no, it’s you-know-what no.”
Huckabee added that he wasn’t “being specifically critical of Christie but that’s not a reform. That’s some kind of proposal that Republicans need to embrace because what we are really embracing at that point is we are embracing a government that lied to its people —that took money from its people under one pretense and then took it away at the time they started wanting to actually get what they have paid for all these years.”
Huckabee called Republican proposals to reform entitlement programs “disastrous, not only politically but I think they [will] be disastrous in terms of further breaking the trust between the government and its people.”
