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 Sen. Scott Brown (R), in the face of a challenge from Wall Street reformer Elizabeth Warren, has been going out of his way to claim that he has been tough on the nation’s banks. Case in point, a recent ad released by his campaign prominently claims that he was “the tie-breaking vote on Wall Street reform“:

The problem with Washington is that people down there are always battling. That’s not how I operate. We’re Americans first, and I’ll work with anyone to get things done. I was the tie-breaking vote on Wall Street reform.

Watch it:

Brown did cross the aisle to vote with Democrats to approve the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law. However, what the ad neglects to mention is the role Brown played in significantly watering the down the law, which has landed him heaps of Wall Street cash.

Brown was instrumental in weakening the Volcker Rule, which was meant to rein in risky trading with federally backed dollars by the nation’s biggest banks. He also forced Democrats to strip from the law a $19 billion bank tax. Without that provision, the Congressional Budget Office is now bizarrely claiming that the law has a “cost” of about $20 billion, a score which Republicans have seized upon as justification for their efforts to repeal the law entirely.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, employees from the securities and investment industries have given more money to Brown than those of any other industry. Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase, which just lost billions of dollars on the sort of trading that the Volcker Rule was originally meant to curtail, are amongst his top ten donors.