High Price of Unions Might Rip Apart Liberalism

Daniel Henninger thinks 2010 will go down in history as the year that marked "the splitting apart of American liberalism's assumptions about the purpose of government." With so many states and cities in financial trouble, liberals have to "come to grips with a tough truth: The demands of public-sector unions and the legal obligations to pay their pensions are collapsing the ability to perform what's left of the traditional liberal agenda," he writes in the Wall Street Journal.

This is playing out in Congress with David Obey's threat to transfer $10 billion to school districts so teachers won't be laid off. Problem is, the money would come from reform programs such as Race to the Top. "President Obama has threatened a veto," he writes. "Keep an eye on it. If this Democratic president stops that Democratic congressman from knee-capping school reform to protect unionized teachers from the world the rest of us live in, you can mark down August 2010 as a first step back from the crack-up."
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