For What It's Worth

This morning's thought is little more than a rumination, I suppose. As Scrooge told Marley's Ghost in "A Christmas Carol," it "may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato."

If that is so, perhaps I should be able to dismiss it as easily as Scrooge hoped to dispatch Marley's Ghost by saying, "There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!"

But, as Scrooge learned, that is not so easily done. It has become no easier in the 165 years since Dickens' holiday tale was first published.

Whatever its source, this thought has been on my mind today. And it will not rest until I address it.

When it was announced yesterday that unemployment had gone over 10% for the first time in more than 26½ years, it re–ignited the now familiar finger pointing from both sides. The Democrats continued their descent into denial, chanting the litany, "It was Bush's fault!" Meanwhile, on the other side of the aisle, the Republicans burst into a spirited rendition of their patented lockstep dance, the "The GOP One–Step." Sort of a circular firing squad.

Well, as long as we're assigning blame — and there is plenty to go around — it's a good idea to heed the musical advice of the late Michael Jackson and look at the man in the mirror. I know an individual doesn't have any clout, but this is a nation of more than 300 million individuals. How many of those are adults?

It is true that corporate greed and bankers' excesses played large roles in the economic implosion, and it is true that politicians of both stripes enabled them through legislation (or the absence of it), but many individuals were willing participants as well. They heard the admittedly self–serving sales pitch from politicians encouraging them to spend their money and juice up the economy long before September 11 (after which, urging people to travel and buy expensive luxury items was packaged as a patriotic act), and they lived beyond their means.

At first, with all that fuel being poured into it, the economic engine hummed merrily along. But the engine grew dependent on that constantly increasing fuel source, and it began to sputter when some people reached the limit of their spending potential. It had to make a downward adjustment to compensate. If you have ever gone on a diet, you know how painful that kind of adjustment can be.

Have you ever known someone who achieved an astonishing weight loss — only to gain it all back and 30 additional pounds as well? That seems to have been the case with the American economy in the last 30 or 40 years.

Take, for example, the subject of automobile fuel efficiency. As long as I can remember, there have been heated discussions about making all vehicles more efficient whenever something has caused a sharp spike in gas prices, and sales of small cars have surged. But, when those gas prices have gone back down, as they always have (although seldom, if ever, to the level that existed before the spike), those concerns have gone away, too, as have many of the small, fuel–efficient vehicles that were briefly popular. Taking their places were cars and trucks (and, in recent years, SUVs) that were bigger and gaudier and more wasteful than those vehicles that preceded them.

Ultimately, the economic engine could not be sustained. And now, as everyone tries to dig out from under this pile of rubble, there are TV commercials extolling the virtues of "getting back to basics." They're still telling you to spend your money — this time on things that are important but not always necessary.

Well, I suppose that's an improvement from hawking things which were neither important nor necessary.

It now appears that this will not be, as many had feared, a second Great Depression. Perhaps a Great Recession. Barack Obama and the Democrats are eager to take credit for avoiding a catastrophe, but educated economists never seem to agree on anything and, since their opinions are the ones that matter on economic issues, the jury is still out on whether the Democrats' actions accelerated or impeded a recovery.

For that matter, there is still plenty of debate over whether we actually are in recovery mode. It can't be a true recovery, some argue convincingly, until the economy stops losing jobs.

But, if things ever get back to "normal" — whatever that may mean — the adults of today need to take from this experience (and they need to instill in the next generation) a commitment to thrift.

Yes, the economy needs people to spend. That's the juice that keeps it going. But our parents and grandparents learned some important survival lessons during the Depression that weren't handed down to most of today's adults.

And one of the most important was saving for that rainy day.

In recent decades, personal savings declined rapidly. That needs to change. Recovering from a recession does not have to mean snapping up the first shiny bauble one sees.

There have been many technological advances in my lifetime, and each one seems designed to prove that no one can predict the future.

But you can prepare for it.