Clearly, not much has changed with the trend. It's very steady. Travel and tourism remain robust and revenue is strong. Spending is strong. Construction continues. When you've got spending like that going on ... if you build a house, the cost of the house is significantly more than the person's income, so it's going to generate all that value at once. The same with a business. The point is construction is high value.

Things have been good for so long that some slowing is inevitable. It's not unexpected.

The volume of traffic is not that much greater, but they're still coming and they're coming with more money.

Still, the one-month modest decline in the index is in line with the general trend of economic expansion since 9/11 (terrorist attacks) and the weakness of 2002.

The broad sweep of expansion shows clearly in the percentage change for the same month a year ago.

Cost of living, it is a concern to be sure.

Families here have wishes and desires no different from people in Omaha.

When you have 130,000 rooms and you're already pushing against the capacity of your roads to move people from the airport to the hotel, you need some sort of effective public transportation or it's just a matter of time before Las Vegas Boulevard becomes a permanent parking lot.

Tourism and construction continue along strong growth paths, bumping up against capacity constraints. Capacity constraints work to hold the rate of expansion.

Someone might find low taxes agreeable, but not the way tax revenues are spent, such as on education.