Walter Russell Mead pours out one fine article after another.

Look at his blunt observations on the desperate situation in Rhode Island where years of not decades of public sector greed and a refusal by politicians and unions there to accept underlying financial realities (especially for pensions) is creating a ghastly mess now:

Rhode Island is looking more and more like Greece, and not in a good way.  That is one message of this important piece by Mary Williams Walsh in the New York Times.  Years of blue social policy have wrecked local and state government finance in the country’s smallest state, and now the bills are coming due.  Services are being cut to the bone and elderly retirees are losing money they thought was secure.

In Rhode Island, it is Democrats, not nasty union-hating Republicans, who are doing the dirty work.  Democratic mayors are telling their unions that there isn’t any money — not because they are vicious corporate stooges who hate working people and want to see them suffer, but because There. Isn’t. Any. Money.

… But “objectively”, as our Marxist friends would say, the union leaders and their political chums were the worst enemies of the workers: they told state workers that their benefits were secure even as it became increasingly obvious that, as a matter of arithmetic, they were not.

Let’s be crystal clear about this.  To tell a 50 year old pretty lies about the soundness of a pension plan is one of the most wicked and irresponsible things you can do without actually shedding blood; people who believe these phony promises will not make the extra savings, work the extra years or otherwise take steps to protect themselves until it is too late. 

Telling those pretty lies is exactly what Rhode Island’s establishment has been doing for some time; it is what Ostrich Party legislators, trade unionists, journalists and governors are still doing across much of the country…

Reform cannot and should not be understood simply as an assault on state and local government workers — although these workers cannot be insulated from the general consequences of a major failure of our political system. 

The problem is not that teachers and firefighters earn “too much” money; the problem is that we have developed a dysfunctional social system which cannot pay its bills.  The public economy needs to be rationalized and restructured, but the most important job is to revitalize and energize the private sector…

Devastating.

Neither the US political classes nor the EU political classes seem to understand that the game based on funding unaffordable spending via the hope of unending growth is up.

The. Money. Is. No. Longer. There.