I will protect your pensions. Nothing about your pension is going to change when I am governor. - Chris Christie, "An Open Letter to the Teachers of NJ" October, 2009

Thursday, April 1, 2010

Stop, breathe, think...

Slept on all this last night, and played around a little more with numbers, and now a few more thoughts are rattling around over my green tea:

1) If I were to put Christie's entire plan into one sentence ("summarizing" is a "higher order thinking skill"!) it would be:

All teachers take a pay freeze this year and start paying 1.5% for their health insurance, and Christie will reward districts who get their teachers to do by giving them the Social Security/Medicare tax money we'll save from paying lower wages; this will make up almost all of the $820 million he cut in state aid.

2) I see a whole mess of problems with this:
3) I was really annoyed at the lack of consideration for the income tax offset yesterday. Then I played with the numbers. Twice. And it's obvious the FICA tax refund is a joke. The numbers are so small as to be laughable - he's going to get wage freezes by throwing around a mere $12 million? How can he get so much press for a plan that is so puny?

4) Why does Christie choose to go after teachers instead of health insurers for insane increases? Gee, I wonder why...

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