I have my heroes among leading American economists and psychologists, some of whom I know. One I don't is Alan Blinder. But when he wrote a book called Hard Heads, Soft Hearts, I knew I'd found my guiding star as an economics writer.
There are plenty of lovely souls whose heart bleeds freely for all manner of people who want us to believe they're being treated badly.
But hanging around with economists has left me imbued with the harsh reality of opportunity cost, my version of which says you can have anything you want, but you can't have everything you want. So be careful deciding.
The hard-headed truth is, feeling sorry for almost everyone is little different from feeling sorry for no one. I have only so much compassion to go around.
So, sorry, but among all the people claiming to have been hard done by in this month's budget, I don't have much sympathy to spare for the university students complaining about the increase in their debts.
By contrast, I have much sympathy for all those unemployed people hoping and searching for jobs that don't exist – unless, of course, the government's own figures for job vacancies are grossly understated.
Had industrial fate not intervened to prevent me attending my 43rd successive budget lock-up, I planned to wear my jumbo size JOB HUNTER NOT DOLE BLUDGER T-shirt, put up to it by friends at the admirable Brotherhood of St Laurence.
How prescient that would have been. The budget turned out to include an attempt to traduce the reputation of all job hunters by launching the government's umpteenth Crackdown on the Crackdown on all those "leaners" who lounge about taking drugs when they should be out pounding the pavement.
Did you know that some people are being given the dole before any savings they have are completely exhausted? It's an outrage on us upright citizens, groaning under the weight of massive taxation.
Isn't Centrelink bright enough to understand that forcing the jobless to go cap in hand to the Salvos whenever some large and unexpected expense occurs is part of their punishment?
Not content with cracking down on the unemployed, this budget cracks down on those lazy loafers at Centrelink. Do you realise there are days that pass without people on benefits being harassed in some way?
Do you realise that older people, some just a few years from pension age, aren't hassled nearly as much as young people are? It's wrong, it's discriminatory, and the ironically named Christian Porter and his hardworking sidekick Alan Tudge are just the punishers and straighteners we can trust to stamp it out.
I don't understand those two. Do they enjoy beating up the poor, or is it a hateful job they must do to keep their jobs in the ministry, to gratify all those pathetic voters desperate to feel morally superior to someone?
Nor do I get Malcolm Turnbull. He produces a surprisingly good budget intended to convince us he's not the pale imitation of Tony Abbott we thought he'd become, that the Coalition is committed to fairness after all, but can't resist adding the most lurid attempt to stigmatise anyone of workforce age who can't find a job.
Is Turnbull that much in fear of losing votes to the Redheaded One? Malcolm, you're a rich man, you don't have to sink so low.
(But let's not have too much righteous indignation from the Laborites. They're the crowd who went for six years without affording a significant discretionary increase in our pathetically low unemployment benefits. Perhaps they had to spend too much trying to prove they could punish asylum seekers with just as much relish as the Liberals.)
Back to the revolting uni students. You'd never know it from their cries of woe, but Education Minister Simon Birmingham has thrashed them with a pillow.
Their tuition fees – and hence their debts to the government - are being increased by just 7.5 per cent on top of indexation to consumer prices, spread over three years. When fully implemented, this will increase total fees for a four-year degree by between $2000 and $3600 – with that range roughly aligned with the likely earning-power of the particular degree.
We keep being told that the level of income at which people with debts begin having to start repaying them has been lowered from $52,000 a year to $42,000. What we're rarely told is that the bottom rate of repayment has been lowered from 4 per cent of their income to 1 per cent.
Combining the two changes, the time it takes to repay loans will increase by less than a year.
Uni students come mainly from the comfortable middle class and go to uni to get a certificate that pretty much guarantees them a well-paying job, including a much lower risk of becoming unemployed or staying jobless for long.
It's true the wider public benefits from the money governments spend educating people to graduate level, but equally true that the personal benefits to the particular graduate are about as great.
On average, Birmingham's changes will increase the graduate's share of the cost of their degree from 42 per cent to 46 per cent – and, thanks to the unchanged design of the loan scheme, do so without discouraging students from poor families from bettering themselves.
Sounds fair enough to me.
