The Tea Party just cost you $322.

That’s the latest cost of their incoherent national tantrum — $100 billion in increased financing costs for which America gets nothing in return. That works out to $322 for every man, woman and child in the United States.

So the Tea Party just cost you $322. They just cost my family $1,288.

You don’t get anything in return for that $322, nor does my family get anything in return for that $1,288. It is simply an added cost due to our sharing this country with aggressively stupid, resentful, angry fools who would rather let the whole thing burn than bother to learn even the slightest bit about others or about the world they live in.

Their willful, determined ignorance just cost you another $322.

Alas, that $322 is not the entire cost to you of their destructive, crabs-in-a-bucket lashing-out. It’s simply the latest cost incurred from their childishness.

This latest cost pales in comparison to the mounting costs of deferred maintenance on our infrastructure; the cost of the fiscal negligence, compounding daily, of not responding to our jobs crisis; the cost of the voluntary economic contraction they’re fighting for; the cost of the litigation that replaces the regulation they despise; the cost of economic growth rejected, deliberately, due to their fierce efforts to suppress demand; the cost of decades wasted putting off the inevitable necessity of developing next-generation energy sources; the cost of the mounting and horrendously expensive consequences of climate change.

These people have real victims. They are hurting others — causing real harm to real people.

And now they have taken another $322 from you. I would say they were thieves, stealing this money from you, but they’re not lucid enough to be thieves.

Thieves at least enrich themselves by taking from others. These folks take from others and just set the money on fire.

They don’t benefit from their tantrum. It harms them as much as it harms you and everyone else you know.

“Some men just want to watch the world burn.”