Jonathan Chait has a good post up about how Republicans don't really care about tax reform. I'd go further and say they aren't all that interested in deficit reduction, either. Let's review the contours of the current dispute between President Obama and House Republicans over ending the sequester. Here is what the president has put on the table:

1. Cancel the sequester by substituting a combination of spending cuts and tax increases. Obama has proposed more spending cuts ($930 billion) than tax increases ($680 billion), and that's before you add to the spending cuts $200 billion in foregone interest payments. 2. The tax cuts proposed by the president would not be a rate increase, but rather a limit on tax deductions to 28 percent of income for high earners. Obama has advocated this change since 2009. 3. In addition, the president proposes to close various tax loopholes, as yet unspecified, to reach $580 billion. 4. The remaining $100 billion in revenue would come from applying to income-tax-bracket thresholds (which rise with inflation) the same "chained" Consumer Price Index that Obama would use to lower Social Security payments. Since the chained CPI rises more slowly than the conventional CPI, taxpayers would reach higher-rate brackets more quickly than in the past. (Liberals can take only limited "what's-sauce-for-the-goose-is-sauce-for-the-gander" delight in this, because chaining income-tax brackets is also regressive. The biggest increase is for incomes between $30,000 and $40,000, and the increase for incomes above $500,000 is negligible.)

The House counteroffer is … actually, there is no House counteroffer, unless you count a sequester-replacement bill the House passed last May that eliminates the sequester's defense cuts and replaces them with domestic cuts. The House hasn't bothered to re-pass the bill since the new Congress began in January.

(The Senate, being majority Democrat, is largely a bystander to this dispute, though it's worth noting that yesterday a Democratic bill to replace the sequester, which combined spending cuts with revenue increases, would have passed if it hadn’t gotten filibustered by the GOP.)

House Speaker John Boehner won't support the president's offer because it includes a tax increase. Which part of the tax increase does he object to?

It can't be the deduction limit, because, according to The New York Times, Boehner as recently as December 17 was willing to support that.