Look at us: We've become a nation that thrives when people spend money they don't have. This is completely upside down from the society baby boomers recall, when the economy was robust, when people made a decent wage and benefits from manufacturing jobs, and the only things they had to finance were their homes and cars.
Since then, workers have seen any growth in income offset by additional health care costs, by having to make retirement contributions once borne by their employers, by having to get big loans to put their kids through college. So, with those additional pressures, and with union membership dwindling and traditional manufacturing jobs transported overseas - all at the direction of corporations backed by government policy - the economy went through a seismic change.
And we ended up here - with a system based on the magic elixir of endless growth, new housing starts, higher and higher retail sales, and trillions in household debt. As it developed, we knew we could not sustain it. Personal bankruptcies rose nearly 34 percent in October.
Three years ago, we reached a milestone that should have given everyone the creeps - the nation's personal savings rate dipped into negative territory for the first time since the Great Depression. Consumers depleted their savings to buy cars they couldn't afford, houses they couldn't afford and furnishings, electronics and vacations they couldn't afford. The next year, the Commerce Department calculated the savings rate at negative 1 percent. Historians had not seen a negative savings rate for two consecutive years since 1932 and 1933.
That milestone was foremost among indicators of a cold fact - the incomes of the vast majority of Americans had stagnated or declined in real dollars for a couple of decades, and people made up for it by spending savings and going into debt. The system was headed for collapse.
Now Barack Obama has promised "change we can believe in." What he needs to help engineer is a new economy, creating new jobs and better wages in ways that make life on the planet sustainable. Talk about "greening" the economy needs to be more than talk. It needs to be the new reality.
John Campagna, a principal with Benchmark Asset Managers in Baltimore, sees that kind of socially responsible, future-thinking investment as the way out. "We need more income in the hands of the majority of Americans in order to sustain our economy, and reduce the need for credit," Campagna wrote in a paper he shared with me. "Our opportunity is to use the urgent need to rebuild our infrastructure, national energy system, and communities in a green, sustainable manner to provide jobs and income for everyone."
And this effort, he says, "will require a large workforce trained in green jobs and industry."
This is the complex and important business of the future. If Obama and Congress want to stimulate something, it should be a green economic agenda, starting yesterday.
