Dr. Mike Walden, North Carolina Cooperative Extension economist in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at N.C. State University, responds:

"Yes, and it's called the paradox of thrift, and what this paradox simply says is that what might be good for the individual household may not be good for the entire economy. Our problem in the economy right now is that there's not enough spending, simply put. That's what a recession means, spending goes down and so production goes down and jobs go down. So to get the economy out of a recession, we need more spending. Well, if individual households, however, are saving more and spending less, you can see the problem. You can see that we're not going to get out of the recession if we're seeing the savings rate go up. This is one reason why we're having consideration of the so-called government stimulus programs. It's sort of like forced spending, where the government says, all right, if households aren't spending, we're going to spend. We're going to do that to sort of jumpstart the economy, and if we are able to spend money on things like roads and bridges and so forth, that will stimulate business. That will stimulate paychecks, stimulate employment and get people back in a spending mood. So we do need to have aggregate spending but of course, each individual household has to decide what kind of spending is best for them."