http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_Party_movement#Use_of_term_...

The implication is that TEA party constituents have no interest in actually understanding the grade-school math necessary to understand a budget.

It is very rare that a supporter of the tea parties actually read any of these descriptions, since fashionable leftists primarily use such insults to signal to each other how enlightened they are. Referring to supporters of the tea party as "tea baggers" gets you +1 left-wing cred points.

Unfortunately, I live in California and frequent hacker news, so I'm the rare person who is insulted on quite a regular basis by my peers who assume I will think more highly of them for peppering such insults throughout non-political conversations (Hey, a satirical article on Haskell! Oh look, another person calling me an idiot for giving a shit about the size of the federal budget and wanting to do something about it before we go bankrupt.)

Of course, teabagging has a risqué sexual connotation so the movement's opponents latched onto the nickname as the proponents dropped it.

The Tea Partiers are known for budget illiteracy, often suggesting impossible or mathematically absurd ideas to arrange government spending. At the lowest levels they suggest that cutting foreign aid and sex education will balance the federal budget. At the highest levels, they praise "courageous" budget plans like Paul Ryan's hand-waving and prayer plan to balance the budget by cutting taxes on the wealthiest and hoping that growth trickles down to all of us and health care costs magically stop rising. In between are the signs waving "keep the government's filthy hands off my medicare," the epitome of Tea Party campaigning this year.

So the story suggests that Tea Partiers have an aversion to basic arithmetic.