Today I saw a car with the perfect personalized license plate for America: CHRGIT. Charge It. Shop 'til you drop; spend as if there's no tomorrow.
Americans' consumer debt is rising at an annual rate of 6.4% and we currently owe $2,586,300,000,000 in short and intermediate term loans, according to the Federal Reserve Board. That's about $8,400 per person. That's not including home mortgages, either. Nearly a trillion of that is on our credit cards. Meanwhile, our personal savings rate has been steadily dropping for some time now; according to the Department of Commerce's Bureau of Economic Analysis, our personal savings rate sank to 0.6% last year (as recently as 1984 it was over 10%).
Quite simply, we delight in spending money we don't have, but are increasingly reluctant to save anything for our future. Our parents read us Aesop's fable of the ant and the grasshopper; we apparently didn't listen.
CHRGIT
Note: this was originally posted on ketches, yaks & hawks 16 August 2008
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