While some are no doubt sincere in their concern, our pocketbook cops are wildly inconsistent. They complain that America is running out of money when it comes to helping the poor, people of color, the disabled and the elderly. Their worries miraculously disappear whenever the military wants to start a new war.

Let's begin with a recent editorial in the Washington Post alleging that single payer in the U.S. is simply unaffordable. It cited studies showing it would cost "$32 trillion over 10 years." Yet in the past 20 years of editorials on U.S. wars — every one of which the paper has supported — the Post has never framed the issue of bombing and occupying as one of cost. Most glaringly, its 2003 editorials in support of invading Iraq never mentioned dollars and cents, even though that war ended up costing the U.S. more than $2 trillion (not including the subsequent costs of fighting Islamic State). Never in any of its cheerleading did it stop to consider the war's affordability.

In the Democratic primary debates and in press conferences, Sen. Bernie Sanders was grilled on "how he would pay" for his free college and healthcare plans over and over again. Putatively liberal publications including the New Yorker and Vox decried Sanders' "vague and unrealistic" price projections. But nobody asked his challenger, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, how she would pay for the "no-fly zone" in Syria she championed that, according to the Pentagon, would require at least 70,000 servicemen and dozens of aircraft.