Wealth & Money Quote by Eric Cantor

Cantor’s line tries to smuggle a moral argument through the language of accounting. “Fungibility” is the tell: a technical term deployed like a weapon, meant to sound bloodless and therefore inevitable. He’s not arguing about a specific budget line item; he’s arguing that money is morally contagious. If any public dollars touch Planned Parenthood, the thinking goes, they “free up” other funds and become complicit in abortion even when the federal rules already restrict direct funding. The claim is less a description of cash flow than a way to collapse distinctions that policy relies on: prevention vs. termination, restricted vs. unrestricted funds, clinics vs. procedures.

The intent is strategic: reframe defunding as basic fiscal prudence rather than ideological punishment. By invoking “taxpayer money,” Cantor cues a familiar civic grievance - you are being forced to bankroll something you didn’t choose - and then uses fungibility to widen the target. If money can be reassigned in the abstract, then every government grant becomes suspect, and the only “clean” solution is to cut the whole relationship.

The subtext is power, not bookkeeping. The argument assumes Planned Parenthood is an abortion provider first and a health provider second, turning women’s healthcare into a budgetary loophole. Contextually, this lands in the post-ACA, Tea Party-era fight to make spending the main battlefield of cultural politics: if you can’t outlaw abortion outright, you can try to starve the institutions adjacent to it. Fungibility becomes the rhetorical bridge from “we can’t directly ban” to “we can still choke.”