KEY POINTS:
I won't go shopping to save the economy. Yes, I know shopping (rather than paying higher taxes, according to Sarah Palin) is what patriots are supposed to do when the going gets tough, at least in the US where conspicuous consumption was George Bush's solution to the post-9/11
recession, and this year's tax cuts were accompanied by active encouragement from politicians to go forth and spend.
But look where that got them. Frankly, if shopping is our route to economic salvation then we're really doomed.
So I'll leave the spending to the big earners who'll get the biggest benefits from National's much-vaunted tax cuts (I'm sure those on half-million-dollar salaries will be happy to use their extra $200-plus a week for the good of the country).
As for me, it's the end of the love affair with the credit card. With three teenagers and a mortgage, there's no mystery about where the money goes. For everything else, we're taking a new approach, which involves delayed gratification, earning money before we spend it, and saving for the things we can't afford right now. It's a little radical but I think the children are starting to get the hang of it. I'm not so sure about the grown-ups, though.
Still, no one should mourn the passing of unbridled consumption. Not when you consider the families in the US who've had to free their loved ones not from the evils of drug or alcohol addiction but from shopping. One retail junkie on Oprah had enough "stuff" in her house to fill 15 jumbo bins, weighing 75 tonnes. "I'm a shopaholic," she said helplessly, "and I just buy and buy and buy."
Her purchases took over every square inch of her home, shutting out the light and suffocating her; they crowded out her family and grandchildren, some of whom stopped visiting because there was nowhere to sit.
The more she bought, the smaller her life became.
You didn't need a psychologist to see she needed help. She needed to find something else to fill her life; she needed to adjust her priorities.
Which isn't bad advice for the rest of us - even here, where we've had an entire TV series devoted to rescuing people from "drowning in their own possessions".
No one knows how bad the coming economic storm will be, how many people will lose their jobs, or their homes.
But amid all the gloom and uncertainty is the realisation it was high time the party was over. For too long we've behaved like children let loose in a candy store, gorging on credit to get what we wanted whenever we wanted it, whether or not we really needed it.
It couldn't go on; it wasn't sustainable. We needed to grow up.
If the looming crisis is forcing a rethink of our spending habits, it should also, like the general election, force us to reflect on our priorities as a nation.
Why, for example, don't we have more to show for the massive increases in social spending over the past 10 years?
Why can we afford to build expensive prisons but lack the will to tackle the well-known root causes of much of the crime in this country?
Why is it more important to force mothers into insecure, low-paid jobs than to help them take care of their children?
Why don't we consider it a matter of urgency to mount a billion-dollar rescue package to save the more than 200,000 children in this country whose futures are blighted by deprivation, if for no other reason than we can't afford not to?
If an economic system based on debt and interest and policies that have allowed wealth to be concentrated in fewer hands and widened the gap between rich and poor have diminished social cohesion and trust and added to the costs of health, welfare, education, unemployment and crime, isn't it time for some new economic ideas and policies which have to consider the social and environmental costs?
In its State of the Nation report this year, the Salvation Army opined that our patchy social progress lies with our skewed social priorities, in what we value as individuals and as a nation.
"If we are to make real social progress and not simply grow our economy as well as our prison population, then we need to reflect on the relative priority we give to economic issues ahead of social concerns.
"We also need to reflect on the efforts we are making to ensure that the children of the poor are not left behind because they have second-class educational opportunities and fragile family lives."
We shouldn't measure our progress solely on how much the economy has grown or the value of the share market or of house sales, said the report, but on "how few people are locked up in prison, how few violent crimes have been committed and how much better children in poorer schools are achieving".
And we won't get there unless we first change our minds about what's important.