The economy begins to turn - maybe

The insanity in the economic culture of our society today is so entrenched that I really don't see, short of a complete awakening like a religious conversion of at least 100 million of our citizens. Our society is doomed to destruction because our society, on both the right and the left, have followed the council of the entitlement god, believing lies and seeking destinations of destruction.

And as Dave Ramsey put it one day: "we are a culture of bass." You don't need any kind of fish food to catch Bass. Bass will strike at anything shiny. Throw a shiny object in front of them and they will take the hook. Our culture is like that. Shiny new car. Shiny new home entertainment center. Shiny new spouse. Shiny new house. We take the hook and pay for it later.

But we as individuals do not have to take part in the insanity.
Start with my five rules of economics.
Learn the fallacies of the prosperity preachers.
Learn about the economic system.
I'll get the links and say more on this stuff later.

This month's economic news.

This month's economic news is good on several fronts. Most importantly, manufacturing is expanding. This, as I say is real money. There is only three sources of real money in a society. Agriculture, mining (including drilling) and manufacturing.

GDP seems to be on an expansion, but the service sector and government can do that without any real national growth. The unemployment rate is up, but that is deceptive, meaning more people got back into the workforce and are looking for a job. The "under employment" index may finally fall for the first time in a couple of years.

Payrolls, and most importantly, manufacturing payrolls expanded both in March and in April, for the first time in years. A couple of months ago, the manufacturing index went into the positive side, but not enough to expand payrolls. Manufactures were able to keep up just by working a little faster. Now they are adding employees.

The threat of inflation is right on our doorstep, and even the Fed Reserve Bank President is a little worried about it, but Washington and Wall Street aren't saying much.

More good news for Americans, the troubles in Greece and a slowdown in China are providing us with a strong dollar and lower energy prices. Despite what anyone may think of the oil spill, it hasn't impacted our supplies all that much. The effects of these things are temporary, and energy will go up again in the future, but we can enjoy it for now.

On the long term, China is beginning to import coal, (just a little) as well as oil and gasoline, so we need to be planning ahead for higher gas and electric prices in a few years.