Henry Ford had the start of a good idea.

Ford had a global vision, with consumerism as the key to peace.He believed that smart managers had an incentive to do right by their workers, because doing so would actually maximize their own profits.Ford announced his $5-per-day program on 5/1/1914. The revolutionary program called for a raise in minimum daily pay from $2.34 to $5 for qualifying workers. It also set a new, reduced workweek. To generate consumers we need to pay the people producing the goods and services well. Money is just the value of exchange we put on these products, money of itself is of no value and can not be stored or exchanged for the emperors new cloths. Like Enron we can not inflate the value of our goods and services . As you must always look to what the consumer wants and can really afford without credit. Credit only increases the speed at which you can consume with an adverse affect on the volume you can eventually have thus making a pyramid scheme for assets which must eventually unfold as we are seeing now. This perpetuates the rich getting richer and the poor staying poorer.
Well my belief is that to generate prosperity you have to pay the workers that actually make the goods and services we want. That is pay more for the physical work and less for the workers that just create complex meaningless paper shufflers that eventually come undone as they are at the moment. The reason we are globally in such a mess is that we have allowed our governments to not regulate the wages of these CEO ,CFO, executive paper shufflers . We set minimum wages in most countries so why not tie the executives wages to multiples of the company dividend. With no more than a limit of 100 times the lowest paid worker , i mean if they are that good they should own the business outright and take responsibility for the losses as well.
In Australia and i suspect the USA there are poor because they make poor choices not because they don't have enough income like my grandparents that relied all their lives on support from their children even though they had more income at times.What i saw around me was poor people that made poor choices. Before my business went broke i smoked ,drank, and ate take away food . I consumed many luxury items but with my income completely diminished i realized i could no longer buy luxuries only necessities. The so called poor in Australia rationalize that because they struggle with a hard life they deserve a few luxury items. The problem is they buy all the luxury items first with whatever is left over for there necessities and expect society to make up the short fall with subsidies and to forgive them criminal activities . They even borrow the money to instantly gratify their pleasure. Due to this experience i have always limited my spending to my income with only modest borrowings to buy a house which i have now paid off by putting the money one would normally have to put into superannuation into paying down the loan which you can do if you are self employed.
I can speak to this as when i was 30 years old my profitable business went broke due to the recession we had to have leaving me with nothing except a car that was worth $2000 that i owed $3000 on. My Picture framing Business which had two factories and seven retail shops employing more than 25 people went broke.During a recession picture framing is one of the first things to suffer, my business dropped to 10% of its previous turnover and never recovered. I did not have the reserves of cash to ride out this decline in sales as i was locked into leases and redundancy payouts and holiday pay for staff.
I was then offered an opportunity to sell a little recipe book door to door for $6. My teenage friendship with Ian Hewitt was the only help i got selling this book from nearly anyone except my parents. Latter Paul Hewitt (Ian's Brother)helped me out with some employment after 5 years of selling the recipe book and a book i wrote called Help Save the Planet with tips on on being eco friendly.All the other friends and staff treated me like i had it coming for wanting to make the picture framing business bigger. It was amazing how strongly condemned i was on their hindsight even though none of them had ever risked anything of their own to create something.
There was a experiment done in the 70's where children were placed in a room with one sweet and told if they did not eat it until the supervisor came back they could have two. Ten years latter they revisited these children and found the ones that could delay gratification where much more likely to have achieved than those that could not even with a higher IQ.
This is exactly what the Asian tiger nations have been doing is not spending now with the opportunity to buy up big latter with their huge savings (it is called delayed gratification and china and the rest of Asia must be well pleased).