Breaking Your Word is Now OK

There's really not much else to say about Chris Christie's budget. It is now officially OK to break your word:

4-month rhetorical war against the teachers’ and other public-sector unions, stepped up the pressure to slash their members’ health and retirement benefits.

The governor conditioned a doubling of the middle-class property tax rebate, for example, on the passage of changes that would make public employees pay 30 percent of the cost of their health insurance, compared with an average of 8 percent that Mr. Christie said many now pay.

He also offered to make a partial payment to the state’s woefully underfunded pension system, but only if the system was overhauled to require bigger payments from workers, smaller payouts and an increase in the retirement age.

“Please, let’s not pick the special interests over our overburdened taxpayers,” Mr. Christie said during his budget address.

Look again at the quote at the top of this blog. Look at it. A lot of people voted for Christie on the basis of this quote, but he's saying now he didn't really mean it, or maybe didn't understand what he was promising. He's happy to blame previous governors for "making promises they couldn't keep," but when it comes to his promises... well, let's just not go there, OK?