It’s always popular to defend Social Security. But there’s nothing in Huckabee’s attack that should be particularly appealing to working-class voters, because they wouldn’t be affected by Christie’s means-testing proposal. The only people who would lose any of their Social Security benefits would be those with very substantial incomes in retirement, almost certainly from investments and large retirement savings accounts. For a retired person, it takes a lot of assets to generate $80,000 in annuity payments annually, and a person has to be truly rich to have more than $200,000 in annual income while not working.

So the Christie means-testing proposal would represent a cut in benefits for those Americans who are doing very well, not the working class.

Huckabee punctuated his attack on Christie’s Social Security ideas by saying, if elected, “I promise you will get what you paid for.”

He meant that as reassurance, of course. But if he actually understood how Social Security works, he’d know that it could just as easily be understood as a threat.