Self-Congratulatory Shee-yat

Here's a "blast from the past": A Tiny Preview from the Future from July 2007.

Interested in knowing what stories will hit the press in a years' time?

Abandoned Pets.

The "New Simplicity" (living within your means; watch for a "Time" article!)

People re-embracing religion

And here we go from Time Magazine: The New Austerity.

Amid all this hand-wringing, Americans have kept piling on more and more debt. The last significant episode of belt-tightening came during the recession of the early 1980s. But that turned out to be just the prelude to a quarter-century of growing profligacy, capped by a final half-decade of mostly mortgage-related fun that will go down as one of the most reckless borrowing-and-lending binges ever.

Now that particular binge has come to a crashing end, and the credit worriers believe their moment may have finally arrived. "I'm not saying we're going back to our parents' level of frugality," says David Rosenberg, North American economist at Merrill Lynch. "But what we have witnessed in the past 20 to 30 years — and especially the parabolic credit growth of the last five years — is going to be bursting in the next decade."

Americans simply don't have enough money to pay back the mortgage and credit-card debt they've run up.

This will, if it doesn't get out of hand (as in Great Depression out of hand), be a healthy development.

Please note that the Eccentric Economist nailed the specific time-frame, the form of the argument, and the magazine that it would be published in cold.

Oh and, ironically, that dude is right. We will not be headed back to our parents' level of frugality; we are going to be going right back to our grandparents' level.

Chuffa, puffa, chuffa, puffa.

The Bullshit Train™ always arrives on time!