After enduring eight years of Chris Christie's insufferable arrogance and bullying, it is tempting to reject every word that comes out of his mouth.

My blood pressure doctor would urge me to ignore him now, to ride out these final weeks in peace. Breathe in, breathe out.

But I went to his press conference Wednesday, and it reminded me that he is dead right about some big things, which is why we re-elected him in a landslide. So, before we purge all memory of Christie, and sprinkle salt on that ground so that nothing should ever grow there again, let's pause.

The first gospel according to Christie is this: We can't afford the benefits we offer to public workers today.

We can't afford to give retiring police chiefs $500,000 in unused sick pay. We can't afford to provide health coverage that would qualify as "platinum-plus" under Obamacare. And we can't afford old-style pension plans that were abandoned in the private sector decades ago.

On Wednesday, Christie's bipartisan commission on public worker benefits issued its final report. If you remember one fact from its four years of thankless and unpaid work, make it this:

The cost of paying pension and health benefits absorbed 13 percent of our state budget in 2016. Without another round of reform, that will double to 26 percent in six years.

"It's hard for people to get their arms around a problem of this magnitude," said Tom Byrne, the co-chairman of the commission. "The personalities are about to change. But that math is not changing. If anything, it's getting worse."

If costs balloon like that, the next decade will be a grinding series of big tax hikes and meaty spending cuts. It is a formula for economic decline that should horrify conservatives and liberals in equal measure.

Because Byrne is right. This is about math, not ideology.

If we spend $100 million on platinum benefits for public workers, that's $100 million less we have for preschool or drug treatment. And if you want Trenton to provide relief for your property tax torture, forget it. You're on your own.

Byrne is a hard-core Democrat, a former state chairman of the party, and son of the former governor. His co-chair, Tom Healey, is a Republican who worked in Ronald Reagan's treasury department. What they have in common is big brains and a willingness to face reality.

My biggest fear about our next governor, Phil Murphy, is that he doesn't seem to get this. He ran from this reality during the campaign, and instead made the public worker unions his closest allies. He's ignoring the math.

Maybe he'll change when he's behind the desk. Christie on Wednesday invoked the mantra of all hopeless political causes: Murphy could do the opposite of what everyone expects, like Nixon going to China.

"That's my hope, that he'll rise to the occasion," Christie said. "I'm a born optimist."

I might have been born an optimist, too; I can't remember. But I've been covering New Jersey politics for a long time, so any scrap of that was snuffed out long ago.

I'm terrified. I'm selling my house in the spring, and I'm thinking about packing a suitcase full of essentials and leaving it by the door.

As for Christie, he didn't solve this problem. When he signed a bill to cut benefits in 2011, he broke his promise to ramp up to full pension payments over a seven-year stretch. New Jersey's fiscal crisis remains among the worst in the nation by any measure. In the respected Mercatus Center's ranking, we are dead last.

Still, I give Christie great credit. We'd be in much worse shape without the 2011 reforms. And the broken promise is overblown: Instead of reaching full payment over 7 years, we are on track to reach that goal in 10 years. Christie put more money into the pension funds than all the governors before him combined, going back to Gov. James Florio.

Still, as with most things, his personality flaws tripped him up. He made himself so obnoxious by demonizing public workers that he undercut political support for the sensible changes recommended by Byrne and Healey.

At his press conference Wednesday, we had to endure another round of that.

"We have among the highest paid teachers in America," he said. "Where are they suffering exactly? And most of these public employees make more than all of you, I'm confident. And yet you're being required to plan and save for your own retirement."

So, his narrative is that the teachers are greedy, and the rest of us should resent them because they are taking our money.

Fact check: Teachers in New Jersey make an average of $70,000 a year, and many of them saw their take-home pay decline after the 2011 reforms shifted health costs to them. Teachers, like cops and firefighters, have been paying their full share of pensions on time every year, while the state has not. Even Byrne and Healey concluded that the primary blame belongs to the state, not to the public workers.

We need a second round of cuts, at least on health benefits and sick pay. But it's not because teachers are greedy and evil. It's because we need the money, and the proposed cuts would leave them with good benefits.

The same applies to the millionaires' tax: It's not that rich people are evil and greedy. It's just that we need the money, and the added tax would leave them plenty rich.

Christie is a wedge politician, like Donald Trump. They gin up support by demonizing their opponents.

But that's not going to fix New Jersey. Because to dig out of this deep hole, everyone will have to take a piece of the shared sacrifice.

Maybe if Murphy does go to China, and asks his union buddies for concessions, he can pitch it that way. Maybe then he won't wind up with an approval rating of 14 percent. Maybe then he can get it done.

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Tom Moran may be reached at tmoran@starledger.com or call (973) 836-4909. Follow him on Twitter @tomamoran. Find NJ.com Opinion on Facebook.