Still More Consumer Spending

Robert Reich is at it again. We need to get consumers to resume buying flat screen televisions made in China, putting the money on their credit cards, and everything will be fine. He goes on at some length about what the problem is not, and then says,

The problem is consumers, who are 70 percent of the economy. They can’t and won’t buy enough to turn the economy around.

Don’t think that he isn’t talking about having people put those flat screen television purchases on their credit cards, either, because he continues,

Most don’t qualify for more credit given how much they already owe (or have already defaulted on).

No thought that maybe an economy that consists of more consumption than production just might be a model that is fundamentally unsustainable. If you are focused on digging a hole without thinking about where that might be leading you, eventually you hit groundwater and you drown. If you keep eating lunch out of your refrigerator and never go grocery shopping, what happens to your refrigerator?

Every effort discussed on restoring the economy is all about getting the “consumer engine” restarted, and no one seems willing to face the fact that it is not lack of regulation that got us into this mess, it is not “Wall Street criminals,” it is the simple fact that we are consuming more than we produce and we are buying more than we can pay for at every level of our society.

And what are both parties of government offering as a solution? Tax cuts.