It was a fascinating trip in many ways and the “end of an era’” as well since one of the main reasons we made the journey was to visit relatives who are now racing the clock to get everything squared away before the moving vans show up in a couple weeks to take them to Arkansas after having lived in Las Vegas for more than 20 years.

They managed to sell their house in North Las Vegas at about the same price they paid back in the late-1980s, a 2012 housing success story if ever there was one for one of the nation’s worst housing markets.

Since they’ll no longer be there, we have even less of a reason to go back there which is why it seems unlikely that we’ll ever visit the place again. If we ever return to Southern California, we’ll likely pass through, but I’m guessing that we’ll never spend the night there again or walk the streets and take in the sights.

Despite the opulence of places like the Venetian, Wynn, and Palazzo, the area had an even greater underlying sense of despair and an obviously growing divide between the rich and the poor that make it all a little depressing to take in – kind of like the troubled relative who shows up at a family gathering with a nice car and a nice, tidy appearance when you know from hearing the family talk about him that the guy’s life is a mess.

From the outside, things appear just fine, but beneath the shiny veneer, it’s a different story.

We stayed at Treasure Island since they had a great deal on rooms at mid-week and it’s right in the middle of the strip with great views.

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Like the airlines and just about every other hotel in Las Vegas, after you get the super-low rate, you get nickeled and dimed for everything and I’d have to imagine that there are many, many people in the hotel and gaming industry whose sole job it is to figure out new and ever more ingenious ways to separate people from their money.

Since, aside from maybe a total of an hour over three days in front of a video black jack machine, we don’t gamble, making money on the two of us is especially difficult, however, they certainly did try and that’s one of the things that makes the place increasingly less fun to visit as we get older – this sense of desperation about getting your money.

Now, a lot of this view of things is shaped by the fact that we’re on the other side of 50 right now, no longer approaching a visit to Sin City with the wild-eyed enthusiasm (and looser wallets) of 20-somethings that continue to be drawn to the place simply because it would appear that anything is possible.

Clearly, we’re getting too old for this stuff and, now living in the wide-open spaces of Montana, we have much less tolerance for being in close proximity to the masses, so, the whole place had a different feel to it after not having been there in four years.

As always, people-watching was half the fun of the trip and, My God!, we’re a fat nation.

From kids to teenagers to young adults to the middle-aged to senior citizens, everyone seems to be carrying around an extra 10, 20, 30 pounds or more. Based on the obesity data I’ve seen, it’s even worse in other parts of the country, but, it was again striking that so many people have become so fat.

I didn’t set out to capture any of these folks on film (and really didn’t take many pictures on the trip at all), but even the photo below of the Fashion Mall happened to include a few people early in the morning who could clearly drop a few pounds.

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We were reminded that a lot of people in this world still like to smoke and that the practice will likely never be outlawed in Las Vegas casinos since people with addictive behaviors make great casino patrons. As I said, we didn’t gamble much, but wherever we did stop for a few minutes, there always seemed to be an elderly chain-smoker within an unacceptable proximity.

As we’re early risers, we saw the usual all-night poker games going on at 7AM and it brought to mind the brief conversation I had with the guy who sold us our house here in Montana (a short sale where they were underwater well into six figures) where a career as a professional gambler was seen as an appealing choice since nothing else seemed to be working.

The population of the Greater Las Vegas area has clearly changed since we visited there frequently in the 1990s. The thump-thump-thump sound of a car pulling up next to you at a stoplight was something that brought back memories of Southern California and provides another reminder of how powerful a force demographics is. Just watching the school kids cross the street about a mile or two from the strip tells you a lot about how the population is changing.

With unemployment as high as it is in Las Vegas, I imagine the place is no longer seen as a salvation for those in Los Angeles seeking greener pastures and maybe a better option for raising a family.

Pete Rose was in a Caesar’s Palace sports-memorabilia shop signing autographs and, after spotting the sign announcing his appearance, I just poked my head around the corner to have a look. He was sitting at a table waiting for someone to approach, no doubt willing to sign an autograph, pose for a picture, or do just about anything else for the right price. Our eyes briefly met, as if we were both trying to determine if we knew each other, and then I ducked back out of view.

It was kind of weird, especially since my parents have been big baseball fans all their life and were affected more than most from Rose’s fall from grace over the years.

There were lots of other interesting things to do and people to watch – one thing about Vegas that is really nice is that you can just walk and walk and walk and just take it all in, making a whole day of it on the strip – but, the biggest thing that kept popping back into my head was that signs of growing inequality were everywhere.

This was most evident after we left Pete Rose at Caesars and crossed the street where, prior to getting back to the Venetian, the Palazzo, and the Wynn hotels, you go through the seedier Margaritaville area where you can almost smell the despair.

Of all the observations that were made during our trip, this was probably the most profound one – the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer – and it’s all on display on the Las Vegas strip.

Now, we had never been inside the Wynn or the Palazzo before and, along with the bridge near Hoover dam, those were some of the things we looked forward to seeing, but, the spotless floors and windows, the fake grass out front, the gaudiness of it all inside, and the sheer ridiculousness of the things they were selling in all those stores just kind of hit me.

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Everything is nice to look at, but it’s just striking how you can go from opulence to despair just by walking a couple hundred yards.

There must be enough wealthy people visiting Las Vegas who think nothing of buying $500 handbags to keep all these shops afloat and, as you watch the middle-aged Hispanic lady spraying a little Windex on some shop window at 7:30 A.M., hours before they open, you then think of fashionable 20-something hourly workers who will show up at 10 A.M. to open up shop, and then to the wealthy patrons that might stop in… and you realize this is a microcosm of our economy  and our society today.

Fewer people have the option of following in their parents footsteps with a middle-class factory job. Instead, they take what they can get in support of the spending habits of those who have money. This goes on to different degrees in other parts of the country, but, it just jumps right out at you when you visit Las Vegas.

I can’t imagine what the place will be like in another 5, 10, or 20 years and I don’t think I want to find out.

GLASGOW, Mont. – Drug crimes in eastern Montana have more than doubled. Assaults in Dickinson, N.D., have increased fivefold in just two years. And the once-sleepy town of Plentywood, Mont., has seen three assaults with weapons in the past few months – a prospect previously unheard of in the tiny community tucked against the Canada border.

Booming oil production has brought tens of thousands of jobs and hundreds of millions of dollars in new revenues to communities across a wide expanse of the northern Plains. But it also has brought more crime, forcing law enforcement from the U.S. and Canada to deal with spiking offenses ranging from drug trafficking and gun crimes to prostitution.

The region is emerging as one of the top oil-producing areas of North America. Officials say up to 30,000 more workers could descend on the Bakken oil fields of Montana, North Dakota and Saskatchewan in the next few years.

The recent kidnapping and brutal murder of Montana teacher Sherry Arnold tragically underscored the changes brought on by the rapid pace of drilling. Two men are in custody, but the case has left residents shaken and led to a huge rise in applications to carry concealed weapons in Montana and North Dakota.

In the wake of Arnold’s killing in the town of Sidney, which is quickly being overtaken by the boom, federal prosecutors began a two-day retreat Monday in Glasgow for about 150 police officers, sheriffs, federal agents and other law enforcement to craft a common strategy to deal with rising crime.

Towns like Plentywood, population 1,600, were until recently places “you could send your kids to the pool in the summertime on their bikes and not have to worry about it,” said Sheridan County Attorney Steven Howard. “All those things are changing,” he said, adding that the Arnold case “has had a chilling effect on our people.”

We’ve heard a lot about the Sherry Arnold murder in recent months. In some ways, it’s probably like the 1860’s gold rush in this part of the country or when they built the railroad not long after with what they call “sprawling man camps” for all the workers who are being paid handsomely. Some small percentage of young men working hard and making lots of money always seem to get into trouble and, understandably, the locals don’t like it much.

Over and over I come across items that are not related to economics, finance, and investing that would surely be of interest to others, but I just never get around to getting them up as posts, a good example being this Associated Press story from before our trip to Las Vegas about the ongoing rise in prescription drug use across the country.

Sales of the nation’s two most popular prescription painkillers have exploded in new parts of the country, an Associated Press analysis shows, worrying experts who say the push to relieve patients’ suffering is spawning an addiction epidemic.

From New York’s Staten Island to Santa Fe, N.M., Drug Enforcement Administration figures show dramatic rises between 2000 and 2010 in the distribution of oxycodone, the key ingredient in OxyContin, Percocet and Percodan. Some places saw sales rise sixteenfold.

Meanwhile, the distribution of hydrocodone, the key ingredient in Vicodin, Norco and Lortab, is rising in Appalachia, the original epicenter of the painkiller epidemic, as well as in the Midwest.

The increases have coincided with a wave of overdose deaths, pharmacy robberies and other problems in New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Florida and other states.

Wow – New York, Florida, and Tennessee, an odd combination. A report the other day on one of the national news shows detailed how teenagers grab handfuls of their parents’ prescription drugs and throw them all into a big bowl at parties for their friends to grab handfuls out of in order to liven things up a bit. A sign of the times, to be sure.

Now, my wife and I have lived the last few decades in California, Oregon and Montana (where, by the way, obesity is almost double what it was in the 1990s), but, you can probably image our surprise sometimes when we travel to different parts of the country.

Also see America’s Fattest Cities that, for some reason, includes only cities in Texas, Illinois, Ohio-West Virgina-Kentucky, and New York.

That doctors learning the results of these recent studies about sugar immediately remove it from their own diet should be reason enough to take this very seriously.

Amid our great health care debate, where many pundits say our problem is “health”, not “health care”, I wonder how much money the nation could save simply by drastically reducing sugar consumption.

From the Jimmy Margulies archive at NorthJersey.com

Living in a part of the country where the Denver Broncos are the closest NFL team – some 700 miles away, if you want to call that close – it’s not clear which is the bigger story, Peyton Manning coming or Tim Tebow going.

Many workers report they have virtually no savings and investments. In total, 60 percent of workers report that the total value of their household’s savings and investments, excluding the value of their primary home and any defined benefit plans, is less than $25,000.

Although 56 percent of workers expect to receive benefits from a defined benefit plan in retirement, only 33 percent report that they and/or their spouse currently have such a benefit with a current or previous employer.

That second one is kind of a shocker, that is, unless those 23 percent of respondents who said there were going to receive a pension but didn’t have a pension retirement plan thought they were being asked about social security.

And this chart says a lot about how the fortunes of aspiring retirees are changing:

That area circled in red has gone from around 50 percent to 60 percent over the last ten years and will likely continue to go higher in the years ahead as long as Ben Bernanke is running the Federal Reserve and savers continue to be punished.

Andrew Schiff, brother of  doomsayer Peter Schiff of Euro Pacific Capital, laments the high cost of private school tuition, living in New York City, and four month long summer vacations in Connecticut that have become difficult to bear on his $350,000 income.

While Andrew won’t get much sympathy from the rest of the country that struggles to make ends meet on a 10th of that income or less – and that is, perhaps, the more important story here – it does illustrate the point that, at just about every income level, many Americans are doomed to financial failure simply because they spend too much money.

I’ll never forget Lakers owner Jerry Buss who, back in the 1980s, famously said that all you have to do to become wealthy is to spend less than you make and to keep doing this over many, many years.

It’s a simple formula, actually.

Yet, in a society where image seems to be everything and buying things you don’t need with money you don’t have is a way of life, that simple wisdom seems about as relevant today as the idea of paying off your mortgage.

I find it hard to conjure up much sympathy for people like Schiff and the primary reason why is that, for decades, I’ve approached personal finances in a completely different way, one like Jerry Buss recommended and which may someday soon come back in style.

Not long ago, a high school buddy of mine who worked on Wall Street for many years asked me how my wife and I were able to quit our cubicle jobs while still in our mid-40s and my answer to him was simple — it’s not just about income, it’s about spending.

Of course, he lives in New Jersey where property taxes are sky high and, as is the case in New York City, other living expenses make a low-cost lifestyle nearly impossible.

I don’t know.

To me, it’s just simple addition and subtraction (with only a little multiplication and division) and having the ability to be flexible in your decision making, but, focusing more on the spending side of one’s personal finances over the long-term seems to be a much better approach to managing your finances than trying to always grow your income and then watch your spending rise to that same level.

Not surprisingly, some who adopt the latter approach find themselves “freaking out” somewhere on a California freeway as Andrew Schiff did not long ago.

Of course, not many Americans like the whole idea of spending less, so, I wouldn’t expect that a new austere culture will develop here in the U.S. very rapidly.

If there is one thing the U.S. is not, it’s Germany (though, if you’re half German, as I am, that seems to be helpful in this particular situation).

More likely, it will be a forced change, but one that will surely come, and not one that many will enjoy, though, embracing this change sooner rather than later might be a good idea.

I can’t tell you how good it feels sometimes to sit back and think how comfortably my wife and I could live here in Montana (if need be) on such a little amount of money – gasoline is relatively inexpensive, taxes are low, and outdoor activities are abundant, cheap, and uncrowded.

Having zero debt is key – another foreign concept to most Americans.

Clearly, it’s all a matter of personal preference and happiness. For all I know, maybe some people are truly happier when they’re griping about one thing or another that they have the ability to change, but, for whatever reason, choose not to.

My advice to young professionals – think hard about what you do with the money you earn because little things over long periods of time really add up.

Another data point comes today in this item at Sober Look in which the dramatic rise in government involvement in student loans is made clear in the graphic below:

I’ve known that rising student loan debt has been doing a pretty good job in recent years of offsetting falling credit card debt in the Fed’s monthly report on consumer credit, but I didn’t know that the gubment was on the hook for so much of it, though, with all the other money that has been gushing out of the nation’s capital since the Great Recession started in 2008, it really shouldn’t be too surprising.

Of course, it would be nice if a college degree was worth what it used to be in the workplace. It used to be that for little or no money you could go out and get an engineering degree at just about any state college and you’d be rewarded with a pretty decent standard of living (I should know, I did it). But, that doesn’t seem quite as easy any more.

“Neither a lender nor a borrower be.” If you borrow to invest, it will interfere with your survivability. Unleveraged portfolios cannot be stopped out, leveraged portfolios can. Leverage reduces the investor’s critical asset: patience. (To digress, excessive borrowing has turned out to be an even bigger curse than Polonius could have known. It encourages financial aggressiveness, recklessness, and greed. It increases your returns over and over until, suddenly, it ruins you. For individuals, it allows you to have today what you really can’t afford until tomorrow. It has proven to be so seductive that individuals en masse have shown themselves incapable of resisting it, as if it were a drug. Governments also, from the Middle Ages onwards and especially now, it seems, have proven themselves equally incapable of resistance. Any sane society must recognize the lure of debt and pass laws accordingly. Interest payments must absolutely not be tax deductible or preferred in any way. Governments must apparently be treated like Polonius’s children and given limits. By law, cumulative government debt should be given a sensible limit of, say, 50% of GDP, with current transgressions given 10 or 20 years to be corrected.)

In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, it was Polonius who said, “Neither a borrower nor a lender be”, words of wisdom that seem to have gone out of fashion over the last thirty years or so but that now seem to be making a strong comeback.