By Roger Wilson

It amuses me whenever I hear anyone complain about all the money that was wasted this year on political advertising, as though it was all sucked into a black hole, never to be seen again.

Even the editorial writers at The Roanoke Times weighed in on this issue in a Nov. 28 editorial, “Better ways to spend $27 million.” (Nationally, more than $500 million was spent on advertising for the presidential race.) My friends, this money was not wasted. It wasn’t flushed down a toilet. Every single penny of it was pumped into a very worthwhile cause — stimulating the economy during tough economic times. Consider these four points:

First, there were all those people whose livelihoods depended at least in part on these advertising dollars.

Think of the people who wrote, recorded, edited and put together the ads, the printers who churned out endless mailings, the postal workers who had to sort and deliver them — on and on the list goes. (The Times editorial did include three sentences that referred to some of these folks.)

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 Wilson lives in Roanoke.