Keith Ellison: “I want to pick up on a theme that Dr. Kagen mentioned a moment ago as he was laying out how he was speaking with some…”

“I want to pick up on a theme that Dr. Kagen mentioned a moment ago as he was laying out how he was speaking with some workers in northern Wisconsin. I was talking with some workers in Minneapolis recently, and we're kind of like cousins, Minnesota and Wisconsin. Folks had talked about how their pay has been stagnant and they haven't seen much of a pay increase except in the late nineties. But the prices of everything seems to be going up: health care, housing prices, and all of that. And what people did in the early part of this decade is they were able to get money out of their houses, right, which has led us into the foreclosure crisis. But what are people doing now that housing prices are flat? Well, they're turning to credit cards. Charge it. They're putting it on the plastic. And I think this is a big deal because I think we need to know that people are essentially consuming not out of savings, they're consuming out of pay-day loans, credit cards. They used to do it out of the equity of their houses. And this is a serious problem, and people cannot consume out of their savings but have to consume out of debt.”