America needs to search for a new economy model with new underpinnings because the preoccupation of our society with the acquisition of consumer goods is finished forthwith. The Obama administration is valiantly trying to recoup the old same old, same old. The restoration of our as-was economy and as-was lifestyle may be impossible.

Consumers, Americans are not, no longer. Our capitalism thrived in the past on different underpinnings that have come and gone, like the cotton, slave-labored plantations before the Civil War. We have had agricultural underpinnings, industrial underpinnings. In the last two decades or so we, somehow, became a society of consumers. We purchased and purchased, on credit, zilch savings.

This last economic model, us as consumers, was brought down, with worldwide economies tumbling, country to country. Never mind the why, the question is can we bring back prosperity. Can anyone, including Obama, return us to the same underpinnings, the same lifestyle, same old, same old? I don’t think so. We Americans have learned the lessons of the bailout era. Never again, will any of us shop till we drop. And we won’t get caught shorthanded again; we’re going to save our money. Instead of 3 or 4 years, our car’s going to last us for 7 to 10 years.

What does these new habits, learned from bad experiences (fired and no other jobs, and the foreclosed homes) mean? It means that those underpinnings that our economy was formerly based upon are gone, gone forever. What sort of underpinnings will take their place? Will we become a nation of personal cottage-industries? A nation of barters? A worldwide soldier-of-fortune nation — army, navy, air force guns for hire? (We may be one already!) I honestly don’t know.

Although, I am not the only one who believes our old credit economy with its society of consumer underpinnings has been shattered. Please Google “Peter Schiff” who is the president of the investment firm Euro Pacific Capital, Inc., in Darien, Connecticut. Check out the many references for what Mr. Schiff has to say. For example, Peter Schiff says stores are seeing a shift as consumers stopped buying after the economy meltdown.

Mr. Schiff has said, “This is the end of the consumer-based economy. Americans have been buying too much stuff, and now the epic shopping spree is over. It is a permanent change.”

Just what will America become next in the new economy which isn’t here yet? What will replace the old, failed underpinnings? Good question, I don’t know, but I do know we won’t return to the model of the consumer-based economy.

There needs to be a search for a new economy model, a new unique economy to take the place of the failed consumer economy.

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