Mr Brown hopes that departments with a fixed three-year budget will devote the energy to spending it well that they used to devote to increasing it.
Unless governments are willing to make massive cuts to spending it is a shortfall that can only be met by increased taxation.
"Does anyone call themselves a neoliberal?" Moneyed barons have financed political tracts for centuries, but the participation of a journalist as someone providing money as opposed to spending it has few precedents.
He was the fifth employee of Sun Microsystems, which meant that he made a lot of money early in life, and he has devoted the rest of his time to spending it on a variety of excellent causes.
In a statement after the hearing, Senator Carl Kruger, a Brooklyn Democrat who is chairman of the Finance Committee, said legislators had agreed that "we need to reform the way we think about money, along with the way we've grown accustomed to spending it".
The hardscrabble life gave him a hunger for making money and an aversion to spending it.
