E145: Presidential Candidate Chris Christie in conversation with the Besties
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All right, everybody, welcome back to the all in podcast. We're very excited today to do our third deep dive long form discussion with presidential candidates for the 2024 election. Started with RFK, and he got a huge boost in the ratings after he was on the pod. We had Vivek. And now governor Chris Christie is with us. Governor, thanks for coming.
My pleasure. Thanks for having me, guys.
All right, so it's a little bit different here than I think some of the other news hits that you do. This is not short form, it's long form. We like to have a thoughtful discussion with the candidates, not with talking points. And I know that you're a straight shooter, so I think you'll fit right in here with the other boys. I think you're very unique amongst candidates that you've actually brought up the deficit, as we know. Just two facts here, and then I'll hand it over to Freeberg for his question. Last two administrations have run up the deficit massively. Here's a chart of our debt. Trump added almost 8 trillion. Biden's added 4 trillion. And this is obviously an unpopular issue to bring up. As you've mentioned, bringing this up is unpopular. It doesn't get you votes necessary to say we have to cut spending. And Friedberg and I are very much. I'll speak for myself. This is my number one issue in terms of picking a candidate. Freeberg, I think you said it's your number one issue. So Friedberg, I'll hand it over to you in terms of a question for governor Christie.
Yeah, governor Christie, nice to see you. You and I sang on a karaoke stage together in Idaho a few years ago, but it's.
I do remember that.
Yeah.
Is that a sly way of saying Idaho? I had to put that two and two together there. Oh, nice reverb.
It was a small bar in Idaho. Oh, it was a small bar in Idaho.
Small bar in Idaho.
Small gathering establishment.
Class has small gathering with a few.
Folks who happen to be in a.
Bar together at the beep conference that.
Shall not be named.
Let your winners ride, rain man David.
Satisfy.
And instead we open sources to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it.
Love you, west, Queen of Kinwa.
We watched the republican primary debate a few weeks ago, and I think what struck me at least was how little focus and attention is given on the fiscal situation. The US government deficit in excess of $2 trillion this year, debt to GDP in excess of 130%. 30 plus percent of us debt is coming due in the next year, which means it's going to get refinanced at the higher rates at probably five and a half percent plus. And then when you look at the demands on Social Security, Medicare forecasts are that both of those systems necessarily go bankrupt unless there's some extraordinary measures taken. And that seems to be a very kind of hot topic golden goose that can't be touched or debated.
All of this seems to be largely ignored.
And so much of the conversation is around social issues in the United States, military issues, war, et cetera, when fundamentally there's no gas in the tank. I guess the point of view I'd love to hear from you is how do you think about that? Does that matter to you right now, or do we think that this is a can that we kick down the road and we'll solve this problem later? We'll grow our way out of it. If we cut some spending, it'll fix itself.
It seems so core to me that.
The future of the United States is going to be dependent on how we're going to manage this fiscal emergency that we're facing.
Well, look, David, it's core to me know if you've seen any of the excerpts from any of the town hall meetings I've done so know I've been talking about both the issues you just raised. First off, I think on the deficit and debt side, I learned about this after becoming a prosecutor and having to come to New Jersey and inherit two problems immediately. We had a $2 billion short term deficit for the last five months of the fiscal year that I inherited, and then we had an $11 billion deficit on a $29 billion budget for the fiscal year starting July 1 of 2010. And I had to deal with both those things. And as you know, unlike the chart that was just shown, you don't get to run it up. You have to square it. And so I learned how hard it is and how ugly it's going to be for your popularity to do these things. So on the first piece on the 2 billion, we sat down, I refused to raise taxes and we sat down and we eliminated 683 individual programs completely and then swept every surplus from a school board in the state. And the way we did that was we reduced their state aid by the amount they had in surplus to get the 2 billion in balance and then extended that into the next budget cycle, kept all those cuts in place, which did some structural refiguring of the deficit and then made additional cuts after that. I'd gotten elected with 48 and a half percent of the vote. And after I did that, my approval ratings went down below 40 in my first six months. But what I knew was it was absolutely necessary because in our state we were already overtaxed. And the idea of raising taxes again was not an option. That was to me viable. So when you learn and you go through that process and then you look at what we're dealing with federally, I think you realize three things right off the bat. One, it is an imperative that we need to reduce spending. What it's doing to inflation and the long term ability of the country to grow it makes it absolutely necessary. Two, to me, kicking the can down the road is not an option because the problem is only going to get worse and it's going to begin to impact our ability to be able to do some of the core things that government is supposed to do. And then third, that you've got to be willing to sacrifice popularity for results. And I'm not going to sit here and say it'll be fun to do it won't be. But I went through it once already on a smaller scale and quite frankly, you have a much longer Runway to do it at the federal level than I did at the state level. I had hard deadlines of June 30, 2010 and July 1, 2010 to accomplish both. On the entitlement side, I think I'm the only person who's been talking about this and saying out loud, we've got to consider raising retirement age and we've got to consider means testing and eligibility for Social Security and those also, I remember watching Biden's State of the union address and to me the most disgusting part of it was when he said, can we all agree we're not going to touch Social Security? And both sides stood up and cheered.
Yeah, I agree. That was the worst moment for me as well.
Liars and hypocrites like they all know it's going broke in eleven years and that's an automatic 24% benefit cut on the Social Security side, an automatic 25% Medicare benefit cut on that side. So you're not going to be able to let that happen. And so you got to deal with those issues. And I think you can deal with them through both eligibility issues regarding means testing, and you can deal with it by also dealing with retirement age. Retirement age. I would do it over the longer term, not for people in their fifty s and sixty? S currently, but for people in their forty s and below.
And let me just say one follow up because to your point, I think the recent polling showed something like 83% plus of Americans support the benefit they get from these two programs, Social Security and Medicare, that it should not be touched. That that is the popular opinion. That is what the voters are saying. Do you not think that you put.
Yourself at risk in your campaign by making these statements?
And how do you get elected and instigate change?
I put myself at risk by running, let alone put myself at risk. I just think you have to be honest with people. It's eleven years. It's not 20 years, it's eleven now. And it means that if the next president doesn't deal with it, then it is going to be in absolute crisis mode when it has to be dealt with. We'll be inside three years and at that point the options will be even fewer. So, yeah, of course. And I know someone will run a.
Commercial, by the way, is that the behind closed door conversation? Is that what's going on? Is the folks that you know, that you talk with, everyone behind the closed door when they're not in front of a camera are saying we are going to have to deal with this in the next presidential administration.
Yeah, but they all say, I can't believe you're saying it out loud.
Right.
But to me, we are in such a bad place in politics in this country. If we don't start telling the people the truth about the problems we have, we're never going to have an opportunity to solve them. And that's risky. But my entire candidacy is risky. So you might as well just go for it and tell people what you really think. And I do think there are a number of people out there who are thinking people. I think most people who answer that 83% number, David, are people who don't even know that we're eleven years away from insolvency because nobody talks about that part. And if you don't talk about that part, why would any of them want Social Security touched? But I'm finding in my town hall meetings,
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