I wonder: Is the life is sucked out of the economy? Unless my entire region is in some sort of bubble insulated from the rest of the world, people right now seem to be enjoying a higher standard of living than at any time in prior history! The hotels, restaurants, bars, and places to shop all have packed parking lots. Most of the vehicles are new, or at least a hella lot newer than mine!
And most of them are huge and inefficient yet people can afford to gas 'em up and blast all over all the time anyway. Nobody is interested in buying perfectly good existing housing; I don't know what today's yuppies are called but they still lust for McMansions out on the edges of town in clusters of lil subdivisions a.k.a. sprawl. It's considered a necessity to spend hundreds of dollars per month for phone, net, and t.v. service; nobody bats an eye at that. And from the looks of things, nobody is going hungry either.