Consumer Spending

Americans. We love stuff. We buy so many things that it’s hard to comprehend mathematically. Roughly 70% to 75% of the $20 trillion U.S. economy is ordinary Americans just...buying things.

Yes, we buy things we need… like cars, and clothing, and food. But we also buy table-top fountains, sandwich presses, waffle makers, scented trash bags, pre-portioned produce, and save-the-date cards.

Add it all up. All that gluttony. All that impulse. All that sheer inability to let money sit in a stock market account and grow, and you get a national economic category called consumer spending.

We don’t have a problem with people buying everything and anything they want. But seriously…do we really need all this decorative soap?