Wonks Anonymous finds it funny that, no matter what we seem to do, the press always seems to manage to blame us for the ills of the economy. Which he guesses would make sense if we lived in a Milton Friedman world where we, the consumers, were the ultimate sovereigns of the economic universe. Wonks Anonymous believes that they may buy into this fiction.

At any rate, after years of taking us to task for not saving enough, the press has discovered a new problem. We are causing the current slump because we are now trying to save too much. It turns out - and this is true - that the more that we try to save under current circumstances the lower demand for goods and services. This will only lower output which will lead to pay cuts and layoffs which will frustrate our desire to save more because it is impossible to save more if your income is falling.

Which is true because right now nobody wants to use the goods and services that we do not consume, our savings, to build factories or roads or to research new technologies. We want to save more than investors want to invest so our savings sit idle in banks that are conserving their funds.

Not that there are no good investment opportunities out there. Technologies still need to be exploited, our internet linkages are primitive, our roads still decay and there are plenty of new ideas out there to discover. It's just that our friends in finance got a little carried away in the past few years what with bubbles and paper profits and all of that and they would like to sit out a few rounds since their heads are a little fuzzy.

Besides, you or I might be satisfied with three or four percent return but to them its just not worth the effort.

Well, the way Wonks Anonymous sees it we have three choices. We can take the fact that our betters are unwilling to provide us with adequate opportunities to invest our savings as the judgment of some almighty market gods. Which would lead us to accept a few decades of low growth, low incomes and low savings.

We even might try to move things along by once more consuming beyond our means although Wonks Anonymous doubts that the market gods would led us the money.

Or we could work together as a nation to find and implement investment projects that would bring reasonable returns and create employment.

Some would have us avoid this since the government, they say, it makes bad decisions and wastes money. To which Wonks Anonymous has two responses: Something is better than nothing and, besides, how has the private sector been doing lately?