The 1970s - the age of bell-bottom pants, disco music and the Dallas Cowboys winning their first two Super Bowls - was also a time when the U.S. economy struggled through a gray period of what President Carter famously called “a malaise” of spirit.

Back in those days, when I wasn’t watching “Welcome Back Kotter” on television or admiring the football handiwork of Cowboy coaching legend Tom Landry, I was a kid with especially bad-looking hair noticing how my parents worked hard to make ends meet for a family of six.

 It was a typical American story back then. The 1970s were tough, man. The inflation rate soared well into double-digit percentages. Interest rates on 30-year mortgages likewise surpassed 10 percent, and by 1980 neared the mid-teens. Gas prices spiked after a Middle East oil embargo, shocking the nation and creating a full-fledged crisis that included long gas lines and general panic. Even as a kid, you could feel it. How bad would things get?

It has been a long time since Americans felt those sort of ominous vibes, but they’re back after a long hiatus. The decline of the U.S. economy in 2008 has been swift, and fraught with so much worry that some commentators have seriously advocated George W. Bush step down as president so Barack Obama can take over early to see if the nation can get its mojo back.

General Motors is going broke, the stock market is subject to wild fluctuations, the Bush administration is out of gas, and Obama says there can only be one president at a time as he names key economic advisors in trying to provide some degree of calm to a nation freakin’ out with worry, (dropping the `g’ like Sarah P).

“It’s important, given the uncertainty in the markets and given the legitimate anxiety that the American people are feeling that they know their new president has a plan, and is going to act swiftly and boldly,” Obama said a Tuesday press conference.

That sounds good, and more power to the incoming president if he can work with leaders of both parties, as well as those from the private sector, in fashioning some kind of new energy and optimism that may begin to lift some boats from the depths of current despair. However, keep in mind that the presidents of the 1970s - Nixon, Ford and Carter - for all of their efforts made little headway with the economic blues of that decade.

It was not until President Reagan got a deep recession behind America’s back in the early 1980s that an economic surge that would largely last for 15 years brought this country to a better place. The new prosperity that lasted roughly from 1982 to 2007, however, intoxicated Americans to spend more of their income - and save precious little of it.

Newsweek magazine reports that in 1982 the personal savings rate for the average U.S. household was 11 percent of disposable income. By 2007, it was almost zero, the magazine reports. Americans spent more - way more - as if they felt liberated from the downer times of the 1970s to splurge and buy anything that moved, or sat on store shelves. More shoes, laptops, appliances, automobiles, clothing, because Americans, as George Carlin famously said, “like having lots of stuff.”

I recall back in the good old days, the 1990s, when my Dad, a man who survived the Great Depression as a kid and was so the epitomy of thriftyness that he drove a Ford Pinto in the 1970s, was sitting in the living room of the McAllen home where my family lived, admiring some new furniture in my abode. We never had new furniture - or new cars - when I was growing up, not even close, so my father was marveling that one of his kids could pull off the feat of stuffing a new house with new furniture.

How much, he asked about the new living room set. I told him and then threw in this kicker - it was all paid for.  All paid for, he asked in astonishment. Yep, I said, feeling like I was making the man who shaped me proud. I had arrived as a man and husband in my Dad’s eyes. I had bought my wife some new furniture and paid for every bit of it early. He was so impressed that in the weeks that followed he boasted on my behalf to my siblings about my grand achievement.

Those were the days, huh? Buying stuff. These days, there is such an erosion of consumer spending that U.S. vehicle sales in 2009 are expected to drop to 12.2 million from almost 17 million in 2005. It’s the reversal of what Newsweek columnist Robert Samuelson calls the “wealth effect.” In the mid-2000s when Americans were still giddy about buying anything that moved, they added about $1 trillion annually to consumer spending, and the U.S. economy at large.

Now, in this new era we live in where Americans are trying to save more, Samuelson says that borrowers are repaying debts, surplus inventories are being sold, industries are consolidating, and government policies are promoting recovery. Economic slumps, as Samuelson writes, correct themselves over time. How long will this one take? Hopefully, not the dozen years between roughly 1970-1982, but markets and economic forces are as much subject to the fickleness of public confidence as the scientific theories of economists.

We’re not going back to driving Pintos, but maybe we’ll try out electric cars. That is, if GM is still around, and here’s saying it will be as the durability of the U.S. economy finds its way.

- R.D. Cavazos

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