Americans stand in amazement at the gas pump and grocery checkout saying things such as, "This is ridiculous." There is nothing ridiculous about it except our total disconnect with reality.

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Good Morning Middle America, your King of Simple News in on the air.

Every so often I have to ground myself with the reason that I began to write both my book and this blog. I revived an old piece that I wrote a while back to briefly explain the root cause of the current ecomonic mess.

I have said that the second largest problem in America was healthcare. The #1 problem that we face makes healthcare appear to be a mere inconvenience in comparison. In fact, the biggest problem facing us makes about every other issue look kind of puny.

So what could be that awful? Global warming? Bird flue? A new Pee Wee Herman movie? Nah, even worse; the very basis of our economy is absolutely, undeniably, without question, and quantifiably unsustainable.

Say what? Yep, unsustainable and mathematically provable to be so; yet we continue down the same old path that leads to a place where even your GPS can’t find the way back.

To summarize what I’m saying; If there is not a sustainable underlying economy to provide decent ongoing jobs for our citizens, nothing else really matters all that much; does it?

Here’s the problem; the underlying plan for America’s economy is based on continual growth. Not just plain old everyday growth, but exponential growth (ever increasing like a snowball).

To make our current economy work, we place larger demands on our supply of natural resources that, not surprisingly, fail to cooperate by refusing to grow in size. So how can that work? “Not very well.” is the correct answer.

Clean water, air, iron ore, copper, coal, oil, and crop lands, are all playing out. The natural resources that we have in stock on this big space ship called earth is all that there will ever be. So what is our answer? Plan to use more next year. Brilliant!

We also need another element to make our current economic plan work; more people. In order to keep up with the necessary population growth, legal immigration into the U.S. has been increased to allow approximately 1.2 million new foreigners to enter each year. Yet, in the past four months, more than 1,100,000 Americans have either failed to find employment or were laid off their jobs.

Our flawed economic plan may well have hit zenith and is in the final stages of failure, as I point out, was mathematically predictable from the beginning. Middle America is going to pull a Houdini and disappear like buffalo if we don’t do something pretty darned quick.

As the passenger in the runaway truck of the old C.W. McCall song ‘Wolfcreek Pass’ said, “Earl, I’m not the type to complain, but the time has come for me to explain, if you don’t apply some brake real soon, they’re gonna to pick us up with a stick and a spoon.”

In the spirit of ol’ C.W., I’m trying to explain just exactly why our truck is running away and why we have precious little time to apply some brake.

Why is oil $123 per barrel? Because the world is running out of crude, that simple. Why is America in recession? Because we are running out of lies. The title of my book is “The Biggest Lie Ever Believed.” That lie is that “Growth is good.” until such time that we understand that ever increasing growth cannot be sustained in a finite world, we will continue our march to the bottom.

Authors Website: www.kingofsimple.com

Authors Bio:
Mike Folkerth is the author of "The Biggest Lie Ever Believed" and is not your run-of-the-mill author of finance and economics.

The former real estate broker, developer, private real estate fund manager, auctioneer, Alaskan bush pilot, restaurateur, U.S. Navy veteran, heavy equipment operator, taxi cab driver, fishing guide, horse packer and few jobs too embarrassing to mention, writes from experience and plain common sense.

Mike’s humorous systems of “Mikeronomics” and “Mikemathics” drastically simplify the economic and mathematic formulas commonly used by very smart, but terribly sheltered individuals.