Great post from Matthew Yglesias about how every public policy initiative you talk about quickly turns to a discussion of monetary costs… except for war. Some great snark ensues:

Expanding SCHIP (State Children’s Health Insurance Program) may be cheap and popular, but you’d better make it cheap enough to finance through gimmicks like cigarette taxes and so forth, because you just can’t unleash the spigots of general revenue on something as trivial as making children not die when they fall ill.

His full post is here.