South Dakotans are very smart people

South Dakotans like that Democrats promise to bring back more money from Washington. We like that Republicans want to keep our taxes low.

Once we have done our work and voted you in, we just want you to go to Washington, get along with each other, and work it out. We don't want to know how it gets done. Just get it done.

What a practical people we are. When we send a Democrat to Washington, we want you to be very scared about voting for something that will raise our taxes. When we send a Republican to Washington, we want you to be very scared about voting against something that will promise us more money.

We don't expect much from our politicians. When our elected officials are back in South Dakota, we simply want them to tell us about all of the money they were able to bring back home while promising to lower taxes for the middle class (which includes all South Dakotans).

Now, if you want our political donations, we expect to hear that you will fight for more money for the water projects, the new city park, and the new school that we want to build. And the new library, the new road in front of our house, the new offramp by our new vocational school, the new grant program we want, the new fire truck, the new...

If you can't get more money and lower taxes at the same time, we don't want you in Washington.

Yes, we don't like that government has grown by 60% over the last 8 years. But we vote on how much federal money is going to come from Washington in order to solve our kitchen table issues.

What do we talk about at our kitchen tables?

We talk about the high cost to fill up our gas tank.
We talk about how much we have to spend on health care.
We talk about how difficult it is to live on small Social Security checks.
We talk about the high cost of college education.
We talk about the high cost of daycare.
We talk about how our job doesn't pay enough.
We talk about the vacation we can't afford.
We talk about the poor pay for teachers.
We talk about the need to have a park closer to our home.
We talk about our roof that needs to be replaced.
We talk about the house that we can no longer afford.
We talk about the potholes in our street.
We talk about our family budget that gets down to zero every month.
We talk about the house that is too small for the growing family.

And we talk about other people, too. But we like to talk about our problems, incessantly. Is it too much to ask of our elected politicians to give us what we want?

Oh, and lower our taxes. We talk about that, too.