Senator Jim Bolin (R-16/Canton) gets to have his inflation cake and eat it, too. Last May he expressed grave concern about inflation driven by federal stimulus spending but said South Dakota should nonetheless participate in that inflationary spending lest some other state get our share. Now with a state budget and numerous special appropriations bills pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into South Dakota projects, Senator Bolin is happy to take credit for big investments of Biden bucks in keeping South Dakota afloat:
State Senator Jim Bolin agrees that the six percent raise for state employees was a big accomplishment.
“Also say that the use of the money, we tried to spread it out to a lot of organizations, colleges, groups, pretty much everybody was able to benefit from, so it wasn’t just concentrated in just one particular area, I think that was a good accomplishment, everybody got a little bit piece of the pie,” said Bolin [Tom Hanson, “Lawmakers Reflect on 2022 Session in Pierre,” KELO-TV, 2022.03.21].
Listen to your own legislators and your Governor when they come asking for your vote. Listen for their generic complaints about darned old Joe Biden and all of his reckless, inflation-driving federal spending, and then listen for that inflation talk to disappear as they laud their own generosity and wisdom in spending all that money on projects around South Dakota, where inflation and economics should work just the same as everywhere else.
Related Paucity of Reading: Representative Jon Hansen made a similar hypocritical show of resisting but not resisting federal spending in South Dakota at the beginning of the 2022 Session. He said last winter he’d crank out a new conservative newsletter to speak his truths to power. But speaking truth is tiring: Representative Hansen’s last post to his Dakota Conservative newsletter was December 21, 2021.
The typical, tax-paying hump is looked down upon from these dudes as just the machine that cranks out whatever is rang up by them, for their disposal, because they were ‘chosen’. Theirs are the only wants that matter. Lord knows they don’t know what needs are. Some have never been thirsty for water. Sweet, cool, pure, clean water. I first look at a person’s service for their community and country when considering them for leadership. Look what happens when we elect a president who had never led so much as a boy scout troop. Show us what you are working with and can do for us, not just how you look in this hat and in this costume and then how you look on Easter Sunday going to church and now how you look in new cartharts getting your hands dirty. Nowadays, or maybe since the television’s popularity, it seems like they just play dress up and we base the vote on their movie montage. Show some honor and not just wrung-out platitude.