David Brooks has a lyrical but vague and pretty misleading column about the entitlement crisis today, and in a feat of rhetorical flexibility connects it to SCHIP. Two problems: as Dean Baker says, the bottom line of the entitlement crisis is health care inefficiency. There is no legitimate centrist "share the sacrifice" position, and it has nothing to do with Social Security. Even CBO director and former Hamilton Project leader Peter Orszag agrees with Baker on the cause of the problem! And SCHIP will have no discernible impact on the long-term fiscal picture. It's $7 billion a year, which is 0.2 percent of the annual budget. And it is fully paid for. Brook's point about the regressivity of the tobacco tax is valid. But if you look at the package as a whole, as the conservative Tax Foundation did, it's progressive.