Good Morning Middle America, your King of Simple News is rousting out another truth.

I was talking to my old friend Cliff Ulman a couple of days ago. Cliff is a long time auto and RV dealer who got his start in finance. His financial abilities together with being an entrepreneur make him quick on the uptake when it comes to economics. It’s amazing how keen ones senses become, when the money being lost or made is your own.

Cliff and his wife Dee have been planning retirement and chose June of 08 as the month that they would pull the pin on their dealership and shift to a more leisure pace. I had called Cliff to ask how his retirement plans were coming as we have shared our future plans for years.

He told me that he was going to get there, but a little more time than originally thought would be required to sell his remaining inventory. This is mainly due to the fact that the RV business is off by about 50%. Whoa!

We hashed the current situation for a while and the conversation came around to the impact that a 50% reduction would have on the overall RV business. Cliff mentioned the people who deliver the RVs and those who manufacture and provide the material to the manufacturer. If business remains at the 50% level, what will clearly half of those people involved in the business do?

The answer came much quicker than I thought. My brother Steve called me on Sunday and during our conversation he mentioned that my nephew, Doug, had lost his job. Doug works…I mean worked, for Fleetwood in their large diesel motor-coach plant in northern Indiana.

I phoned Doug to get the details. He told me that he had seen the handwriting on the wall when Fleetwood had laid off some 300 workers last winter and not called any of them back. He went on to tell me that on a recent Friday, when the workers arrived at the plant they were told that it was their last day. Nice.

The second and third shift people didn’t get that courtesy, they were phoned and told not to come to work; their jobs were terminated on the spot. This last layoff affected another 300 people, some of them man and wife. Some with 25+ years of service.

No severance, no notice, no nothin’, including no job. In Doug’s words, “It’s a dying industry.” So what do 600 people in the same area do for work, after all, they have their homes and families to consider. Perhaps they could go to work for another manufacturer, but then Doug told me that at least two other RV manufacturers in the area had closed down completely, displacing hundreds more workers.

With this many people unemployed, it may necessary to move to another locale where the job market is better. But, how do you sell your home in an area where most jobs revolved around the manufacture of both RV and full sized mobile homes, both of which are failing? And, where is there a better job market when you don’t speak Chinese?

As we watch the unwinding of our economy, I see no end to the current trend of rising unemployment. The path to this point in our history is littered with broken promises and poor planning by our leaders. But it is also littered with unread history books and a total lack of even basic common sense.

We must begin a radical change to sustainability. The first item on that list should be, “Throw the bums out.”