Response to Doug Sacks Week 9 Post

I would have to say that both sides are to blame for the overspending in America, but primarily it is marketing that has lead to this overspending. It seems as though over the last couple decades marketing as taken on a much more important and aggressive role in business. With sex apeal and the need for social status at the forefront, marketing agencies are constantly instilling images of what society expects of you more or less. By saying buying this body spray will get you the hot girl, or buying this car will put you in a higher social class, marketing firms are basically poking at the consumer and telling them they are not good enough unless they have this item. Though this has almost always been the marketing trend, I feel over the last few decades it has taken on a much more aggressive form. The idea is no longer to make you want the product, but to make you need the product in order to fit in with society.

The Overspent American response

          After watching the film “The Overspent American“ in class on tuesday it provoked a lot of thoughts about our country, our culture, and our way of living. The narrator makes some very interesting points about about the spending habits of Americans and how it has effected us negativley. We are spending more than we make in process she refers to as “competitive spending“ in which we are constantly trying to establish ourselves as wealthy and succesful in the eyes of others by buying big expensive items with fancy brand names that we can flaunt. She discusses how Americans are never satisfied with what they have and are constanly trying to attain more posessions in what she refers to as “keeping up with the Jones“.
         While I do agree with many of the points the narrator and the film are trying to make about overspending and its role in our most recent recession, I also feel she is failing to see that this “striving to be the best and biggest“ mentality is exactly what caused America to become one of the richest and most powerful countries in the world. The narrator refers to what she calls the “work and spend model“ which basically states that productivity leads to more work, which leads to more spending, which leads to more work to cover the extra spending, which leads back to more productivity, and so on. Throughout the film she refers to this as a bad thing. However this is a classic example of capitalism at its finest and how both consumers and businesses alike grow and flourish. If it were not for this “work and spend“ model, our form of economy would not be effective. Of course there are examples of consumers and businesses that take this model to the extreme which often causes more harm than good, but as the old saying goes “You cant have your cake and eat it too“.
         So what do you think? Is the over spending we are doing in America something that is potentially detremental to society or is it simply capitalism running its course?