Sustainable Consumerism

The global economy has been sinking into a quagmire allegedly created by the magnitude of crappy mortgages that turned into foreclosures in the seminal year of 2008. Everything seemed to be going along reasonably well until something happened. People went to work and earned their paychecks. Mothers shopped for groceries and toted the children from one after school activity to another. Consumers bought new cars, flatscreen TVs, cell-phones and iStuff. Cable and satellite content delivery utilities put every conceivable sports event on screens in millions of American homes. Beer and a multitude of fried potato and corn products ran aplenty. Tens of millions of Americans earned a paycheck, received a pension payment, got a public assistance check of one kind or another, and dutifully spent all of it on the consumables, commodities and utilities and medical bills. All seemed right with the world.

But lurking just beneath the surface was a condition so insidious that it would bring down the global economy in a way that the most diabolical arch-villain criminal mind could not even imagine. On top of that, it was not especially dastardly in its character. One could not point to the evil doers and single them out for punishment.

The unsustainable geometry was that there isn't enough income in this country to buy all the stuff that needs to be bought in order to keep everyone employed. The situation becomes even worse as more and ore jobs migrate to less developed countries to allow their people to earn the living that they need. They can make the products but not afford to buy them. Therefore, they are not the consumers that we are.

In order to pay for all that stuff, we needed to borrow against our most valuable assets: our houses. As our real buying power from earnings fell over the last decade or so, we supplemented it with the easy credit that the financial sector was so eager to provide at 6% to 18.99% compounded interest. The system had no option other than to implode. It could not be sustained nor could it expand indefinitely.