Reply #3: It is a legitimate question. Is a purge necessary might have been a better way to ask.

[ThomWV]

Your argument has merit but please consider this, it is not that we spend, but that we spend on things that are intended to be wasted. We do not buy out of necessity, often not even from desire, but always from the constant pressure to buy. Mental manipulation by marketers. If it were just a matter of spend, spend, spend, we could be buying stocks, bonds, machine tools, the means of production. But we don't.

So I would suggest that rather than being the "spend" generation we are now the 'waste' generation.