RichardH pointed me to The New York Times piece Bonuses for Billionaires.  It started like this:

The first few times I heard House Republicans talk about our budget mess, I worried that they had plunged off the deep end. But as I kept on listening, a buzzer went off in my mind, and I came to understand how much sense the Tea Party caucus makes.

Why would we impose “job-crushing taxes” on wealthy Americans just to pay for luxuries like federal prisons? Why end the “carried interest” tax loophole for financiers, just to pay for unemployment benefits — especially when those same selfless tycoons are buying yachts and thus creating jobs for all the rest of us?

Richard thought it might be something I had written until he looked at the by line – By Nicholas D. Kristof.  Of course he might have noticed that the guy in the picture had hair on top of his head.

Richard also wants me to advise you that the column contains sarcasm.

Sarcasm Warning – be careful that you don’t read too much of the column before you realize that the author is being sarcastic.

The first paragraph of Senator Scott Brown’s e-newsletter stopped me in my tracks. I show the first part of his news letter below.

He explains his symbolic vote for a balanced budget amendment with this remarkable statement, A balanced budget requirement is something we have in Massachusetts, and I think it would be good for the entire country at a time when …

I made a phone call to his office expressing my hope that as a U.S. Senator helping to make economic policy for the entire country, that he understood the vast differences between a state budget and a federal budget. I said that I hoped he understood why it might make sense for a state to be forced to balance its budget, and yet make no sense for a country to have to operate under this restriction.

I begged him to tell me how much he understood about macro-economics. In the short time that I had to leave the message for him, I did not get to ask him some other questions.

For instance does he understand that an entity like the United States that has its own currency must behave differently from a state which does not? Does he understand that borrowing using your own currency is different from borrowing in someone else’s currency?

Does he understand that the federal government running a deficit during the current lesser depression could actually stimulate jobs in the entire country whereas a state as small as Massachusetts could not have that same effect on the entire country (it could have that effect on the local economy.)

Does he understand that the Federal Reserve system whose head is appointed by the President runs an institution that can create huge sums of money almost at will while no state can do the same thing?

Does he understand that the federal government’s failure to collect enough taxes from the wealthiest 1% can cause a huge amount of wealth to be sucked out of circulation in the entire economy, but a state the size of Massachusetts could not have such an effect of that magnitude (and it would be pretty much confined to the local economy)?

To cap it off, he wants a constitutional amendment for what could be a temporary phenomenon if only the second major party in this country had even a rudimentary understanding of macro-economics.

If Scott Brown wanted to legislate like a state Senator and not a federal Senator, he could have just stayed in the Massachusetts State Senate. Is it too much to expect that when you change jobs to an organization that is more than 50 times larger than the one you were just in, that you learn the differences in the duties of the new job compared to your old one?