With Christie, I get the sense that this SS proposal isn’t something that has been burning him up for years, it seems more like: "what can I say that will endear me to the anti-government types and Wall Street at the same time?’ His campaign has no oxygen and very little money, it’s just a stunt in a desperate search for attention.
No Trump?
I’m not real bullish on Christie’s chances, and even less so for Perry, but I don’t see how Sabato can put those two in 3rd tier while putting Carson in 2nd tier. Carson is going to be the Michelle Bachmann/Herman Cain of 2016: popular with the conservative wing but destined to implode spectacularly.
ETA: oops meant to quote RTFirefly’s link
It’s just that cutting entitlements (including Social Security) has been the Village way of demonstrating that you’re Serious for a couple of decades now. So he’ll get little if any criticism from the mainstream media on this proposal, and of course the GOP is generally in favor of dismantling the safety net in all of its manifestations, so he won’t get any flak from his own party on it. And since he’s not going to get nominated anyway, the fact that Dems and independents might be upset about this really doesn’t matter.
So I don’t find it particularly bold at all. As someone who used to be a regular WaPo reader, he’s just proposing the same shit that’s been pushed by Fred Hiatt’s scribble page for about the last forever or two. What’s ballsy about that?
The difference is that Liz Warren is saying stuff that needs to be said, but hardly anyone else who can get their voice heard is actually saying it. Christie’s making a proposal that gets made all the time in prominent venues, most notably including one of America’s most influential editorial pages.
Thanks! The only one that I was really iffy about was still classifying Rand Paul as a contender. He hasn’t exactly been impressive out of the gate, but he’s got time to recover. We’ll see if he can.
I don’t think Sabato intended second tier to indicate a better chance at the nomination, just a different type of candidate. But it does make his ‘rankings’ less meaningful.
Nah, I’ll bid three clubs. 
Oh, and increasing the Social Security retirement age is so controversial that Jebbie just came out in favor of it as well.
This is why Christie can’t win. If he comes up with an issue that resonates with the party, all Jeb has to do is adopt the same position and it pulls the rug right out from under Christie.
Look, I think I’ve earned my liberal cred on this board, but seriously? How in Og’s name is saying “Look, if you have between $80K and $199K in post-retirement annual income, you ain’t hurtin’ so we’re going to gradually reduce your SS payout until $200K when you stop getting anything. Oh, and by the way, we know you paid in, but you won the life lottery, so deal.” cutting a “safety net”?
If you turn SS into a means-tested program, it will fall prey to the attacks that every means-tested program falls prey to: “Those slackers are taking my money.”
As a universal program, it’s popular. As a welfare program, it won’t be. That’s what people who suggest means testing are hoping to accomplish.
The benefits are taxed above a certain income. I think that’s the right way to go about it.
That’s still means testing, it’s just doing it in a way that’s less politically problematic.
The real issue though is the program’s finances. While getting people working and incomes up is one way to solve that problem, it’s Green Lantern Theory stuff. If it was easy to raise wages, everyone would do it, because no incumbent would ever lose in an economy where raises were rising for everyone.
So we’re left with figuring out what the system should look like when not everyone can be a winner. It’s obvious that the net losers should be the wealthy, but you also have to accept at that point that the politics of Social Security change drastically. The advantage of a rising retirement age is that it’s still the same for everyone, and besides, the retirement age was originally set higher than average life expectancy.
Carson announces his decision May 4. Huckabee May 5:
Of course, if most of the people in the country could earn a living wage working 20~25 hours a week, and the economy was not being managed by demented sociopaths, maybe retirement would not be that big an issue. I believe that that could be a practical, workable society, if a very difficult one to get to from here.
Well, if you import millions of unskilled workers, you can’t get there.
Well, Superman or Green Lantern, they’ve got nothin’ on me.
That would be true if the President were a term-limited dictator, but not in our actual political system. The GOP has figured out that there are no consequences to them when they hobble the President’s economic program, only to the President and his party. It would have been pretty simple to get more people back to work much sooner; orthodox Keynesian economics showed the way. But after the initial stimulus bill back in 2009, the GOP stood in the way. (And all but 4 Republicans in the Senate voted against that, too.)
Only in the sense that “the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges.”
OTOH, if we give some sort of medium-term right not to be deported to the ~11 million undocumented immigrants already here, then employers won’t be able to refer them to the INS (or whatever they call it these days) the moment they step out of line. The ability of employers of illegals to do this puts downward pressure on wages and working conditions alike, so depriving them of that power would help and not hurt wages for American citizens.
Gee, I wonder what they’ll decide. 
An interesting analysis of why Cruz could win the GOP primary.
Which only helps if you’re stopping the flow. if you’re amnesty is just a humane response to past policy failures that’s one thing and might actually increase wages. If it’s instead an admission that we are never going to be willing to do mass deportation and thus anyone who wants to come here to work can come here and work, then that demand for jobs here will keep the price of labor low for as long as any of us are alive.
Or at least reducing the flow to something lower than our economy’s ability to create new jobs. At any rate, I’m all for reducing the flow of illegal immigrants into the country.
The thing is, regardless of what the immigration rate is, a legal regimen that doesn’t allow employers to use the threat of deportation to extort work from undocumented immigrants at low wages and in crappy conditions will be better for the wages of American citizens than a legal situation that does allow employers to do that.
So do what you will about border control, but make it possible for workers to protest their working conditions or quit their jobs without having to worry about being deported for it.
Are any of the Republican proto-candidates willing to do mass deportation?