This is an article really worth reading - and, sadly, it predicts some bad times coming.

Here's the link and some snippets:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,726575,00.html

Reich: This is one of the areas that are very easy to demagogue. By accusing government of being the enemy and promising people that if we simply shrink government they will be better, some politicians and ideologues are attempting to improve their own positions of power. They are misleading the voters. We know that when the private sector is unwilling or unable to spend and when consumers are under a huge debt load, government is the last remaining spender, at least in the short term. Longterm deficits do have to be reduced, but unless we get the economy growing in the short term through government spending, we're all going to be experiencing a much longer and more painful socalled recovery. We need a bigger stimulus now.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Why then is President Barack Obama's Democratic Party so wary of considering an increase in government spending?

Reich: It started with the bailout of Wall Street. The socalled Tea Party movement that's gradually taking over the Republican Party began when President George W. Bush and, after him, President Obama provided Wall Street with $700 billion. It looked and felt like an insider job, a rigged deal to many Americans. In the US, when there is a sense that government and business are in cahoots, the tendency is to blame government rather than business. Had Obama put very strict conditions on that bailout, requiring for example, that Wall Street firms lend to small businesses, that homeowners be allowed to reorganize their mortgage debts under personal bankruptcy, that they limited their own pay, I don't think we would have had the kind of reaction we did. Obama also failed to connect the dots, showing America that the financial reform bill, the health care bill, and the jobs bill, the stimulus package, were all part of a broader effort to restore the middle class and fairness in the American economy.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: It is easy to blame the politicians. But what about the American consumers? They went on a spending spree -- and should have known better.

Reich: The American economy has grown dramatically over the last three decades, but median wages have barely grown at all. Median family incomes have grown slightly but only because women have gone into the paid workforce in great numbers, because everyone was working longer and because people had more disposable income to the extent that they could borrow. Now we're in trouble because all of those coping mechanisms, as I call them, are exhausted. When so much income goes to the top, the vast middle class and working class simply don't have enough money to buy all the things the economy is capable of producing without going deep into debt, and that debt bubble cannot be sustained. To suggest that the problem is that American consumers spent beyond their means begs a far more fundamental question: Why didn't their means increase as the economy increased in size dramatically?