By Sam Todd
My parents were very difficult to shop for at Christmas. They already had everything they wanted, let alone needed. My wife and I now find ourselves in the same situation. We are not the consumers department stores were hoping for this Christmas.
A lot of other consumers are not either. ‘“Consumers have thrown in the towel” commented Nariman Behravesh, chief economist, at HIS Global Insight, on the 3.1 percent drop in consumer spending between July and September, the first period of decline in 17 years’ (Newsweek, 11/10/08, p. 25). In previous economic slow downs the American consumer was the hero; he kept on spending even when businesses were cutting down on investment and hiring. But our hero used up his savings and then some. “The personal savings rate dropped from 11 percent in 1982 to almost zero by 2005. … By 2006, household debt was 134 percent of personal income” (Ibid. p. 28).
The consumer began following the very bad example set by his government. The 1988 Vice-Presidential debate is most remembered for Senator Bentsen’s ambush of Senator Quayle: “I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Etc.” But what most struck me was his response to Quayle’s lauding the prosperity of the Reagan years. “I can give you prosperity too,” Lloyd said, “If you let me write billions of dollars of hot checks” (or words to that effect). Increasing government spending while decreasing its income (taxes) produced a fool’s paradise.
The American consumer was not so foolhardy as the financial geniuses running great investment banks and brokerage houses who made extravagant bets on dubious securities with borrowed money. The consumer simply put more consumables than he should have on his credit cards. Now he is pulling back. And the world trembles. Can the American economy survive if we only buy what we need? What will happen to that part of the advertising industry which makes its living persuading us to buy things we do not need with money we do not have?
I have had numerous conversations with people who, like me, were merely inconvenienced, not devastated, when Hurricane Ike hit Texas in September. We had revealed to us how much we could do without. Our needs are rather modest. We all need food but not nearly so much as we have been eating. Phil Graham accurately, if indelicately, pointed out that America is the only country in the world where millions of poor people are fat. We all need clothes but not nearly so many as we own. Is the dress which was smashing last year really not fit to be worn this year? And of course we can only wear one outfit at a time. Our present cell phone, TV, iPod, automobile is quite serviceable though not the latest model.
God knows, I am not against wealth but it is worth asking what it consists of. If you Google the richest man in the world, you get names like Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and Carlos Slim. Here are some other answers. An anonymous rabbi said, “The richest man in the world is the one who is content with what he has.” But can the auto industry survive my contentment with my car?
Henry David Thoreau wrote: “that man is richest whose pleasures are the cheapest” (Journal 3/11/1856). But will frugality doom the economy? Paul Krugman, who won the Nobel prize in Economics this year, explains the paradox of thrift, “how individual virtue can be public vice, how attempts by consumers to do the right thing by saving more can leave everyone worse off. The point is that if consumers cut their spending, and nothing else takes the place of that spending, the economy will slide into a recession, reducing everyone’s income” (New York Times, 10/31/08, p. A27). So deficit spending by the government which was once profligate is now a necessity.
John Ruskin had a notion of riches which will not wreck the economy. “That man is richest who, having perfected the functions of his own life to the utmost, has also the widest helpful influence, both personal, and by means of his possessions, over the lives of others” (Unto This Last, Sect. 77). Ruskin’s definition would certainly fit Christ. “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich” (II Cor. 8:9 RSV).
“Once in royal David’s city…he came down to earth from heaven, who is God and Lord of all, and his shelter was a stable and his cradle was a stall; with the poor, the scorned, the lowly, lived on earth our Savior holy. …And our eyes at last shall see him, through his own redeeming love; for that child who seemed so helpless is our Lord in heaven above; and he leads his children on in the place where he is gone” (hymn 102 vv. 1, 2, 5).
Meanwhile my wife and I attempt to share the wealth by participating in an alternative gift market which many parishes sponsor. Instead of giving me a tie I do not want, for $35 Sara can, in my honor, buy a goose for a family breeding a flock of them (Episcopal Relief and Development catalogue item FS2301). She is easy to shop for too. I wish the Heifer project had been around when my parents were.
The Rev. Sam Todd is dean of the IONA School for Ministry and retired associate rector of Palmer Memorial Episcopal Church, Houston. This column will appear in the December issue of the Texas Episcopalian.