Wow. Okay-- he did it again. Brad Hicks just wrote about something I've totally thought for a long time, only he explained it better than I could. PLEASE check out this post, it's well worth the time.

http://bradhicks.livejournal.com/415689.html

Excerpt:

"Why was it a crisis when, for as brief a time period as a month and a half or two months, American people became suddenly thrifty? I'll tell you why.

It doesn't matter how much investment money is available. It doesn't matter how low you make the taxes on businesses or on wealthy investors. It doesn't even matter how many overt government subsidies you give to big businesses. It doesn't make any sense for any business, anywhere in the world, to pay someone to make products unless there's someone out there who can afford to buy them. And over the twenty eight years since the election of Ronald Reagan, American businesses have cut wages, relative to inflation, in good times and in bad times, almost every single year. And with every increase in productivity due to better technology, they've laid off more of the workers who might have bought their products, instead of using that productivity to make more affordable products and more products and hiring more future customers with the profits. Americans tried to do their "patriotic duty" to the world economy, they succumbed to the lie (that they should never have been allowed to be told) that it was safe and smart to draw down their home equity to increase the debt limit on their credit cards, by paying them down with home equity and then maxing them out again "because house prices can only go up." Been in a restaurant lately, or a clothing store, or on a car lot? Now there's no one left to buy anything. So who will hire them to make it? Not just here in America, either; since that tap of easy (but, truly, unaffordable and unsustainable and fraudulent) credit has dried up, there've been mass layoffs in all the places those jobs went to, too, including China."