Good news on income

Although the recession has been officially declared as over, there are still many issues in the economy. Any piece of good economic news is worth crowing about, and, as N.C. State University economist Mike Walden says, we have some positive results from the governments latest report on personal income.

“This report — again a lot of these government reports come out with a little bit of a lag — this is for the spring of this year, second quarter. And what the government found is during that second quarter nationally personal income actually rose. It rose by 1 percent. I mean it doesn’t sound like a lot, but at least it is an increase.

“The interesting thing for us here in North Carolina is that the increase in North Carolina was even bigger. It was 20 percent bigger. Our personal income rose by 1.2 percent, and indeed that put North Carolina in the top rank of states ranked by their personal income gains. … North Carolina actually had the biggest gain in personal income here in the Southeast.

“Now big question: Why? We don’t know exactly why, but my guess and I think the guess of many economists is that our manufacturing base is helping us. Manufacturing has actually been one of the fastest recovering sectors in the economy, and because we are more than most other states a manufacturing state, still the improvements that we are seeing in manufacturing (are) pushing up our personal income.”