Chris Christie sounds good to me … But he is still a politician who can’t explain the real truth

Having served on task forces set up by three New Jersey governors to look at the employee benefits for State workers, I know first hand how out wack (a New Jersey term) they really are. All the governors who asked for the studies ignored the recommendations so when I learned what Christie was making changes I was glad to hear it. I knew they didn’t go far enough to align government benefits with the private sector (the people paying the bill) but he was making inroads.

Then I read this on Bloomberg.com written by Josh Barro:

But a hard truth Christie absolutely will not tell is that every one of his budgets has been unbalanced by more than $2.5 billion. When Christie said tonight he has signed “three balanced budgets,” he wasn’t telling a hard truth — he was using bad accounting to hide a hard truth.

Each year, Christie has achieved “on paper” budget balance by making inadequate payments into the state’s pension fund, effectively borrowing from the fund. Christie has touted this year’s $1.03 billion pension fund payment as the largest in the state’s history. Too bad the state’s pension actuaries told him to deposit $3.74 billion.

And Christie said tonight that his pension reforms will save the state $132 billion over 30 years. But those savings are backloaded. Pension costs will continue to rise over the coming years and squeeze out funding for public services. Even after reform, the hard truth is that New Jersey still has a defined-benefit pension system that is unaffordable and exposes taxpayers to excessive investment risk.

Christie probably couldn’t do much better given the pension and health care mess the State is in and no doubt neither voters nor State workers want the truth, but it’s still disappointing.

So you see, it doesn’t matter, Republican or Democrat they make promises they can’t keep and pass along the problems to the next guy. So it is with Medicare, Social Security and health care reform, they ignore the truth, they are ignorant of the truth or they intentionally hide the truth.

Americans accept this nonsense year after year because they only hear what they want to hear, they ask no questions and instead merely line up for their share of the largess.