Economists Urge Impoverished Americans To Spend Their Last Dollars On Junky Stuff

“It’s your patriotic duty to run up your credit cards and deplete your savings and buy anything in the stores,” Council of Economic Advisors Alfred C. Lundquist told a hastily assembled Washington, D.C. news conference.

“Our economy depends on people spending their very last dollars on whatever they can find in the malls,” Lundquist told reporters. “If our savings rate doesn’t drop to negative five percent, our entire economy could go into the tank.”

Lundquist said that while he admired the desire of some Americans to save money for a rainy day, “as far as corporate America is concerned, that rainy day is here. And we want your wallets and purses to be our umbrellas, our shelter from the storm.”

Reporters asked Lundquist whether it made sense for Americans, whose job prospects were shaky and whose housing values were plunging, to take their hard-earned cash and just go shopping.

“If they don’t spend what they have,” Lundquist said, “the economy will tank for sure. We economists don’t like to admit it, but our entire nation depends on people spending approximately ten to fifteen percent more than they can afford, year after year after year.

“The only bright spot on the horizon,” Lundquist concluded, “is that with a Democratic administration taking over, if the American people runs out of money, the government can always just print more.”