Mendozaaaa!

Hooray! God bless the unstoppable economy of the U.S. of A.! All hail George Dubya Bush and Ben Bernanke! Consumer spending is on the rise!

Consumers boosted their spending in May as their incomes grew solidly, an encouraging sign that high gasoline prices haven't killed people's appetite to buy.

It was the second month in a row that consumer spending went up 0.5 percent, the Commerce Department reported on Friday.

But that's not all! Incomes are up too!

Incomes, the fuel for future spending, rebounded in May, growing 0.4 percent. That was an improvement from the 0.2 percent drop reported for April.

Umm... wait, if my math serves me correctly, that means that spending rose 20% faster than incomes.

The levels of spending by the government for public projects climbed to $284.5 billion in May and spending by private builders for nonresidential construction grew to $343.1 billion -- both were all-time highs.

Hold on a second. Who's paying for all this? Did you ever notice the similarity between economic reporting and payday loan ads?

The savings rate is now negative 1.4% which means that average American is going several hundred dollars farther into debt every year. That doesn't sound like a whole lot of money, but consider that a large number of them are due to retire in a few years. Yet the average baby boomer only has about a year's salary in retirement savings. So that first year of retirement should be all right, but what do they plan on doing once they reach age 66?

I guess there's always the McBain Plan.