As a child I lived a privileged lifestyle, not because I had parents and family who cared about me, mostly because I grew up a country kid. When I was eight, we moved from the plains of eastern Montana to the family homestead on East Pass Creek at the foot of Wyoming’s Big Horn Mountains. On Pass Creek, I had the luxury of living one-half mile from Slack School; the proverbial one room country school of western fame. With the added enrollment of me and my two brothers, we bloated Slack to just over a dozen first through sixth graders.

Education was different in 1965. We said the Pledge of Allegiance at the start of each day and a prayer before we tore into our lunch boxes every noon. Everyone had school chores and the sixth graders were responsible for shoveling the stoker full of coal and hauling ashes out to dump on the driveway. Dang, I wished I was a sixth grader because they used the neatest square nosed shovels I had ever seen. (In 1965 the ACLU hadn’t contaminated the foothills of Wyoming so we didn’t realize we were being abused. We thought we were normal.)

As this was the grade school where my father began his studies, I had heard numerous stories about school in 1938. As he always walked the half-mile to school as a kid, I thought I should do the same. So I did. (In all honesty, it was uphill in only one direction, it was only snowy in the winter, and I did have two socks.) To make good use of my idle time plodding back and forth to school, I had a stash of rusted tin cans in the brush patch at each end of my route. When I wasn’t kicking gravel off the bridge into the creek to scare the fish, or sliding my metal lunch box up the icy winter roads pretending I was bowling, I was kicking a can up the road. Today child psychologists might offer such can-kicking is a good stress-management technique which allows adolescents to properly channel negative thoughts about poor body image and self-esteem…whatever that means. (I did it because I was bored.)

I told you that story to show what it is suppose to mean to “kick the can down the road”; an old phrase making resurgence in today’s political lexicon. Today, politicians parenthetically “kick the can down the road” to avoid the responsibility of doing the right thing and instead let someone in the future correct their mistakes.

The entire progressive movement is built on the pyramid scheme that citizens will never fully understand they have been gifted goodies paid for with their own tax dollars. Unconstitutional freebies like Obamacare, Medicare Parts A, B and D, Medicaid, Social Security and seemingly endless unemployment benefits are promised and by the time Americans realize they have been snookered, the can will have been kicked so far down the road it will be impossible to bring it back. (Can kickers are bipartisan, hence the Medicare Part D inclusion.)

Montana, just like every state in the union, (plus the union itself), is in dire straits economically. Rather than actually cutting government, politicians nearing the end of their terms will use amazing accounting gimmicks to make budgets appear balanced. Moving $18.5 million of the coal tax trust fund (TSEP), which by law is to be used for local infrastructure projects, and temporarily using it to balance Montana’s general fund is a perfect example. Doing such will kick the can a solid two years down the road so in 2012 retiring politicians can pack their boxes and leave all while claiming Montana was one of two states whose budget was in the black when they turned off the porch light. Politics is such an honorable profession.