It now turns out that David Brooks and Ross Douthat  really liked the part about the Senate Health Reform bill where there would be a tax on employer provided health care. That because simply every economist - or at least all the folks at Brookings - thinks that taxing health benefits is the just the only way that we are going to reduce health care costs. And it will make simply everybody happier.

Now Wonks Anonymous has been extremely vocal in his doubts about this plan. If you tax health benefits employers will drop health benefits or they will put employees on plans that have higher deductibles and out of pocket requirements. Even the evidence presented by Jason Furman of Brookings indicates that this will be bad for low income sick people. Furthermore Wonks Anonymous suspects that this is all about raising taxes on working folks to help maintain the light tax burdens of the rich.

Let this pass. There is another point here.

It turns out that both these guys thought that parts of the Health Reform were pretty peachy - as well they should because taxation of health benefits is an idea left over from the previous administration and pushed by the defeated presidential candidate - but, as the Health Reform was dragging its way through the Senate, they could not be bothered to express support for it.

Instead they kept mum while their friends in the Tea Party movement, among others, slagged the reform because, among other things, it would tax peoples health benefits.

Wonks Anonymous supposes that they hoped that they could secure even more concessions - aside from super lite regulation of the insurance industry and no real public option.

He also suspects that they wanted to see the tax increase passed with only Democratic votes so as to avoid the blame for the consequences.

Now that a maybe, kind of, sort of liberal bill might just pass these guys crawl off the bleachers and try to join the huddle. In order to secure cooperation you need to punish people who do not cooperate. The time to put in your two cents was last year guys.