“Get back!” Steve hollers reflexively after Boots snaps the flank steak on the cow struggling in the squeeze chute. Boots submissively drops to the ground, Steve turns to trip the head catch release and Boots springs off the ground for one last bite. The cow bellows and explodes out the chute with Boots hot on her heels. “Get back!” Steve hollers again and Boots stops, spins and shoots back under the pole fence to re-assume his position on the ground against the squeeze chute. The next cow steps in and the process repeats itself over and over—a cycle I’ve watched about 700 times every fall.

Since Boots is all Border Collie he is impervious to both instruction and exhaustion. By midmorning, Boot’s tongue is hanging out so far it appears there is more Border Collie in front of his nose than behind it. If he were a teeter-totter obeying the strict laws of physics, his tongue would be on the ground and his backside would be in the air. It doesn’t slow him down.

After a decade of cow work, all the miles are crippling old Boots. He is no less enthusiastic today than he was as a pup, but now at day’s end he staggers to the yard for the evening’s rest, more dead than alive. Too tired to moan or move and with just enough energy to keep his heart beating, Boots collapses on the grass. The next morning, he stretches and stumbles back towards the corral ready for another day on the job. I suspect when he passes on they will need to bury him deep to keep his carcass from chasing cows. He is a ranch dog, his life is snapping cows and it is all he knows.

Now, I told you that story so you would understand this one. Demonstrating the same relentless enthusiasm as Boots, tax-and-spenders live to collect taxes and redistribute money. It’s all they know. Apparently, being charitable with other people’s money, whether you have it or not, is as infectious as chasing cows, and the numbers prove it.

The Whitehouse proposes spending $3.729 trillion in 2012 against estimated revenues of $2.627 trillion with the $1.01 trillion shortfall simply rolled into the $14.2 trillion national debt—let our grandkids carry the load. In response to tea party pressure, the GOP is proposing $60 billion in budget cuts; a meager 1.6 percent reduction in expenses. Portraying this decrease as extremism, Rajiv Shah the head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, said such draconian cuts “would lead to 70,000 kids dying” worldwide. (That sounds like a bit of a stretch to me.)

Understanding trillions can be confusing to us rednecks more familiar with billets than budgets, so let me put a Montana face on the federal spending. Suppose your ranch job combined with the income of your trophy wife’s employment as a Wal-Mart greeter, yields a family annual gross income of $40,000. In 2011 you resolved to get your financial house in order so your family agreed to the same GOP 1.6 percent reduction in spending. Divided over 365 days your draconian family budget cuts amount to $1.76 per day—one-half the price of a latte. That’s it. Compared proportionally to the national debt, your family credit card, auto loan and mortgage debt would total $262,719.70 and it would take 408 years to pay it off at $1.76 per day. Do you see the problem?

The tax-and-spenders at every level and their media accomplices are accusing budget cutters as being heartless, mean-spirited, misers balancing the budget on the backs of the poor, the disabled, sexually active college students and seniors. Just like with Boots, this is all instinct and spending your money is all they know.

During last week’s Senate floor debate on Montana’s biennial spending bill, Senator Mitch Tropila proposed an amendment increasing spending to the Montana School of the Deaf and Blind by $64,000. It was defeated. He immediately fired back a second amendment increasing the spending only $34,000. His oration was spiced with tearful emotion and the Senate Republicans, acting like young pups learning to chase cows from an old Border Collie, began collapsing like a house of cards. In a mere three minutes and forty seconds, Montana taxpayers spent $34,000 and this is why it is so easy to grow government.