Posted
8:42 AM
by Gene
Why most news stories should be one graf:Journalists and others with a tendency to see glasses as half empty have a long history of pronouncing the American consumer maxed out. "Time for a New Frugality," this magazine declared in 1973. "Over the Ears in Debt," it chimed in again in 1987. It wasn't just TIME. Historian of credit Lendol Calder has assembled a long list of worried headlines through the decades: "Debt Threatens Democracy" (Harper's
, 1940), "Is the Country Swamped with Debt?" (Business Week
, 1949), "Never Have So Many Owed So Much" (U.S. News & World Report
, 1959). And so on.And so on and so on. And so on and so on and so on.