Trego's Mountain Ear

As our election approaches, the largest advertiser I see is Jon Tester.  I’m tempted to rewrite that sentence, but it’s correct on so many aspects.  A 2006 NY Times article describes him as ‘just under 300 pounds in his boots’.   Open Secrets shows that his PAC has raised just under 43 million dollars – my rough math shows that to be somewhere on the close order of $40 bucks per Montanan.  And I’ve just looked at this graph (and I saw it on a Canadian blog):

The ad that barrages me is that Sheehy wants to sell off public lands.  I’ve seen the ad so often that I burned out on it – and then, a Kennedy-quality brain worm brought a simple question: What other asset does the US have that can pay off the national debt and preserve the dollar?  It’s something like $268,000 per taxpayer.  35 trillion dollars and rising. 

Jon Tester is a master of looking positive while funding the nastiest attack ads – and that’s probably what it takes to be a successful politician at his level.  That 2006 NY Times article described the economics of his Big Sandy farm – not having made $20,000 a year.  A senator’s salary is $174,000 per year, so it might be difficult to keep things up if he just went back to farming.  But my thoughts run to paying off the national debt.

The graph shows that interest payments were under 3% when Jon was elected to the Senate, and in those ensuing 18 years, it’s gone up to about 4%.  When Jon went to Washington, the National Debt was at 8 ½ trillion – now it’s 4 times that. 

I’m a westerner.  I like public lands.  Tester’s ad resonated with me the first couple of times I saw it.  After a dozen exposures, I came to the sad realization that Jon Tester and his associates in Congress, in irresponsible budgeting, have condemned our nation’s public lands to the auction block.  That probably doesn’t bother congresscritters from New York or Rhode Island – but it does bother an old man who grew up with public land available.  Term limits for our nation’s congresscritters can’t come soon enough – one term in Congress, then the next term in prison.