A Crisis Foretold: "Pat" Moynihan Predicts

When just getting past the immediate crisis simply won't work ... The Dixieland band, composed of unions and elected Democrats, is not able to function anymore, and debt is mounting on the States and the Federal government at unsustainable rates. Remember, Lenin was very much behind the organize the organized strategy.

Obama seems to be wanting to be the one that bankrupts and brings America down.

Regarding Wisconsin, Pat Moynihan saw it coming. But did the last of New York's grand public intellectuals also divine the limits of the modern American welfare state?

The proximate cause of Wisconsin's high drama is clear: an entitled class -- public-sector employees -- is pushing back hard against an emerging economic reality. Their privileges -- wages and benefits unreasonably superior to those earned by their private-sector counterparts -- are no longer tenable.

And there is the more basic question of whether the employees' function is sustainable in the modern economy.

Unionists elsewhere, sensing the threat, are rallying to them -- anxious that the turmoil in Madison's capitol rotunda portends permanent change for them.

The crisis proceeds from the deep recession of 2008, and the stunning dropoff in government revenue that accompanied it.

No state was immune; nor were few localities.

Some governments -- California, Illinois and Connecticut -- are in denial. This won't get them very far.

Some -- New York, city and state -- are finessing the problem; that, too, is a stopgap.

And others -- Wisconsin and New Jersey in particular -- have confronted the issue, both rhetorically and substantively.

......

Moynihan, ever the partisan warrior, advised Democrats to adopt "approaches to public-sector spending that [represent] good-faith efforts to keep costs from rising more than necessary."

His party didn't listen, but his counsel remains sound -- and not just for Democrats.

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But Americans aren't going,