Lugging three huge plastic trash bags packed tight with stuffed animals to Goodwill, I made a mental note, again, that our children have too much stuff.
Not to be outdone, their parents have too much stuff, too.
We’ve been decluttering our home lately, which means, essentially, jamming all of the useless things we’ve accumulated over the years into storage bins where they will be ignored for eternity.
It’s been a rather depressing exercise because I could no longer hide what I had long suspected: We’re full-fledged members in America’s Club Gluttony.
We over-consume. We under- save.
It’s not an exclusive club. It has millions of members.
Americans no longer live within their means. And why should they? Over the years, banks and the federal government have created enough schemes that we really believe we don’t have to.
Yet now we’re feeling the effects of our financial illiteracy.
Our economy is driven by consumer spending so we’re encouraged to spend, spend, spend. We’ve done such a good job, our national savings rate is below zero.
Nearly everyone has access to amazing amounts of credit today, so naturally our credit card debt has reached historic levels. We owe nearly $1 trillion.
Remember layaway? If you couldn’t afford something, you put it on layway and made payments. That’s called living within your means. It’s a totally foreign concept. Now, you simply apply for instant store credit and walk out with your purchase.
And if you can’t make those credit card payments, you can always take out a high-interest “payday loan.” More and more Coloradans do each year.
People also have used their homes as ATMs, borrowing against the value. That cash cow has dried up with the slumping housing market and, as the saying goes, the chickens have come home to roost. Except now there’s no roost. Coloradans are losing their homes at record rates.
Thousands of people are teetering on the edge of bankruptcy because they’re living in homes they can’t afford. Predatory lenders are to blame in some cases. But at some point, the blame has to be on us for not comprehending the small print, for borrowing more than we can realistically afford.
We have unrealistic expectations of what we should achieve in this country. We’re all entitled to dream, but we’re not all entitled to the same American dream.
That giant sucking sound you hear isn’t NAFTA, as Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton now want you to believe, it’s our own financial illiteracy taking us right down the drain.
And now we’re looking to the federal government for bailouts when — surprise — it doesn’t live within its means either.
Congress and the president spend, spend, spend like we do, and have created historic deficits. Yet in a few weeks many Americans will receive checks from the federal government — so we can spend more. And considering the federal government is broke, it’s money borrowed from foreign countries.
As an editorial in the Des Moines Register noted last week: “With the value of the dollar sliding and record national debt piling up, Uncle Sam finds himself going down to the pay-day lender run by the Chinese government.”
It may help spur the economy, but selling your country’s future to another country hardly makes sense, especially from a national security standpoint.
And as we swirl down the fiscal drain, the remaining candidates for president have yet to address spending and entitlement reform in any meaningful way.
Americans need to clean their own houses first, then demand government do the same.
Editorial page editor Dan Haley can be reached at dhaley@denverpost.com.
