And this OP merely reflects what I already know. Most Americans have very little money to spend on anything beyond necessities.

-Laelth

are something you'd expect to see back during the depression.

Families are going out with trucks or car with trailer just to cut downed wood that is laying on State land. Problem is, they have to walk through a foot and a half of snow to bring it out to the road.

2 situations I saw last weekend had dad cutting the wood and mom and 2 kids around 12 years old carrying the wood out one stick at a time.

We have never seen as cold a winter as this. There are over 150 homes in the city of Jackson that have no water as the underground pipes froze somewhere between the house and the street.

Going to get down the -14 real temp tonight!

It is not rocket science. If people feel secure in their job and are drawing a weekly paycheck they spend their money to go to restaurants, on vacation, for a new car, for appliances, to remodel their house, to buy a house, to buy some non-essential things that they would like to have but have been depriving themselves of, etc.

Once people start spending their money - it jumpstarts the economy. More demand means more production. More production means more people needed to be employed to meet the demand. More people put to work those people enter the continued fueling of the economy. It starts to churn. Sales tax, property tax, federal and state income tax revenues rise.

I just don't get it as to why companies don't understand that. I'm no economist. It's just common sense.

Right now people don't have money to spend - so retailers are suffering.

The right things to do are to raise the minimum wage. Put people to work - we have a crumbling infrastructure that can be shored up - if people were put to work on infrastructure projects.

Like I said above - it's not rocket science. We have a fix staring us right in the face to fix our anemic economy. It's about time Congress does their job and does the right thing.