I'd love to be able to take the Bulletin's article on Bend's economic growth at face value. Nothing would be better for my business than the picture they paint. But it's almost like I've been trained by past articles to look for the hidden darkside.

The most obvious problem is that it talks about the growth in the GDP from '01 to '05, which I'm afraid is a little like talking about the stock market growth from 1925 to 1929 -- when its 1931.
A glimpse into the bubble isn't going to tell us much about what's happening today, is it? It's the past. What's likely to happen in the future?

Secondly, I've never had much doubt we were attracting some wealthy people to Bend. How much of the GDP is attributable to the wealth they brought with them, even the wealth that was created because of the wealth they brought with them? That is, can they sustain that wealth now that they actually live in Bend? I think that remains to be seen. I sure hope so.

Will they leave if they can't sustain that level of growth? I doubt most of them will, which means that most of them will have to accustom themselves to a different level of growth and sustainability. If they can sustain even a major portion of that wealth, then Bend will have accomplished a transformation that will be in the textbooks. It's possible, but not likely.

Meanwhile, a third of the job growth in Bend is housing related industries. I suspect it is much higher than that, not to mention how many jobs are dependent on the money generated by those relatively high paying jobs. (I'm not clear, for instance, if financial services are included in that third, if not they should be.) I suspect that much of that work is in abeyance, and that we'll see a pretty high layoff rate in that group.

My guess is that much of the GDP that the economists are talking about is churned money, brought in from the outside. If you bring 10k from somewhere else, and enter it into the Bend economy, that enters into the GDP growth. But is it generating any money, or just being used up and spit out.? Because I think that if Bend has a genius industry, it's taking other people's money and creating buildings like the Old Cigar Building (a beautiful corpse) and letting birds of a feather lose their money together.