You Can’t Do Anything Without Money

NYT article hints at some thin reeds of agreement between Democrats and Republicans on health care:

While Republicans generally oppose any new entitlement or tax increase, they do have some areas of potential agreement with Democrats. They agree, for example, on the need to emphasize wellness and preventive health programs; to provide more transparency for price and quality data on doctors and hospitals; and to speed the approval of lower-cost generic versions of high-cost biotechnology medicines.

I think political reporters need to stop treating Republican opposition to tax increases as the kind of thing that goes in a subordinate clause of a sentence. For one thing, this is a very fundamental principle of the modern conservative movement—it’s not something you can trade-off or logroll in favor of something else. For another thing, without the revenue that comes from tax increases, you can’t do much of anything else. The situation has only been made worse by the fact that lately the right doesn’t advocate cutting particular programs either. Instead of detailing things they’d like to see cut, conservative politicians advocate arbitrary broad “caps” and then turn around and insist that their own pet programs should be spared.