Since he came into office, Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) has complained about the nation’s deficit, at one point blocking a crucial extension of unemployment benefits because it wasn’t offset with spending cuts. “The federal government continues its binge spending at an astonishing pace — running up our national debt and leaving our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren with an ever-expanding IOU,” Brown wrote in a Politico op-ed.

However, according to an analysis by independent budget analysts requested by the Boston Globe, Brown’s opponent — consumer advocate Prof. Elizabeth Warren — would do more to reduce the deficit if her preferred policies were put in place:

In response to a request from the Globe, the two competitors in the nation’s most high-profile Senate battle provided five ideas for bridging the nation’s $1.2 trillion deficit, with the results highlighting why the problem has deadlocked Washington. The candidates were also asked to explain what cuts they would make to entitlement programs, and to describe how they would raise more revenue.

Though Brown has made the deficit a larger issue in his campaign, an analysis prepared for the Globe by a nonpartisan group showed that responses offered by Warren, and positions taken on her website, would trim 67 percent more from the debt over 10 years than those offered by Brown.

Neither candidate submitted a full plan for deficit reduction, but still, the fact that Warren’s policy preferences came out so far ahead in terms of deficit reduction should prove that Brown is just a deficit peacock: willing to use the deficit to score political points, but not actually interested in reducing it. Warren’s reductions were largely the result of tax increases on the wealthy, while Brown actually lost some deficit reduction when he proposed repealing President Obama’s health care law.

As his campaign against Prof. Elizabeth Warren picks up, Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) is trying to take credit for the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law, saying in an ad last week that he provided the “tie-breaking vote” that got the law through the Senate. However, Brown’s ad neglects to mention that he demanded that the law be watered down in return for his vote.

Brown focused his efforts to weaken the law on the Volcker Rule, which is meant to prevent banks from engaging in risky trading with federally backed funds. And according to the Boston Globe, his efforts to weaken that rule did not end after President Obama signed Dodd-Frank into law:

In the second stage, as regulators began the less publicly scrutinized task of writing rules amid heavy pressure from the banking sector, Brown urged the regulators to interpret the 3 percent rule broadly and to offer banks some leeway to invest in hedge funds and private equity funds.

Supporters as well as critics of the banking industry agree that Brown’s suggestions would mean looser regulations for banks, though specialists disagree on the extent of the impact.

MIT professor and staunch reform advocate Simon Johnson said Brown’s prescriptions amount to “significant loosening of the regulations and [are] absolutely serving the interests of people who do not want to have meaningful reform.’’

While Brown was working to water down Dodd-Frank, he received 400 percent more in campaign donations from the financial industry than than the average received by other GOP senators during that period. And money from the financial sector hasn’t stopped pouring in. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, employees from the securities and investment industries have donated more to Brown than those of any other industry. JP Morgan Chase, which just lost billions of dollars engaging in risky trading, is one of his top ten donors.

Massachusetts Democratic senate candidate Elizabeth Warren reacted to the news of JP Morgan’s $2 billion trading debacle by calling for the bank’s CEO, Jamie Dimon, to step down from his position as a director of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s board. Today, Warren also said that the episode makes the case for a return to “boring banking” — separating investment banking from traditional commercial banking — which was the status quo before the deregulatory zeal of the late 1990s:

Q: You think had it [the Volcker rule] been in place, we wouldn’t be talking about this?

WARREN: Well, I’m going to put it this way. The Volcker Rule would help. We don’t know exactly the nature of these trades. But if the question is is the Volcker rule enough, or do we need more, look, I’m somebody who believes we really should have boring banking. That banking should be — the part that’s about savings accounts and checking accounts and our money system — should be separated from the kind of risk-taking that Wall Street traders want to take. That was originally what the Glass-Steagall Act was about, it was repealed in 1999. There was an effort to get it into Dodd-Frank in the 2010 bill. That effort failed. I think we really do need that kind of separation. We need to go back to boring banking. The people who want to take risks need to take risks with their own money and do it somewhere else.

Watch it:

This echoes the call made by economist Paul Krugman, who noted that the era of boring banking “was also an era of spectacular economic progress for most Americans.”